> I think it may be interesting to distinguish runtime and compile time dependencies. > Compile-time > dependencies hard matter for a user, because it is not his problem, but mainly of > the maintainer of > build.xml. E.g. mmbase on compile-time depends on an informix JDBC. It is no > problem, because > runtime you don't need it, unless of course you want to use informix.. it's currently even more complicated, depending on whether a jar is present at compile time the resulting mmbase.jar is diffrent (you are reversing the problem by demanding that a developer will compile against informix)
I am in favour of making a difference between compille time and runtime, but not in those situations. servler.jar is the only compiletime required jar that I can think of (I'm not that smart :) ). If editwizards required xerces, it's fine if tests require junit that's fine to but why require informix / javamail in the core? are you shure javamail is shiped with tomcat? Is there already code in the core that requires javamail? btw if informix where to be removed from the core the build process would become more elegant.
