I have reviewed the dependencies of the Open Source projects I release, and a number of them have optional dependencies. It seems that Jigsaw currently provides no easy way to convert these projects to modular jar files:
Joda-Beans http://www.joda.org/joda-beans/dependencies.html 4 optional dependencies (Joda-Collect, Guava, Freemarker, MongoDB) 1 mandatory dependency (Joda-Convert) Joda-Time http://www.joda.org/joda-time/dependencies.html 1 optional dependency (Joda-Convert) Joda-Money http://www.joda.org/joda-time/dependencies.html 1 optional dependency (Joda-Convert) Joda-Convert http://www.joda.org/joda-convert/dependencies.html 1 optional dependency (Guava) ElSql https://github.com/OpenGamma/ElSql/blob/master/pom.xml#L329 1 optional dependency (Spring) A common "solution" to optional dependencies is to release a "core" project and a second project that depends on "core" and the other dependency. but as can be seen, doing that would probably more than double the number of modules. I'm afraid there are limits to my open source generosity, and more than doubling the modules I release simply isn't going to happen. For Joda-Beans, you'd need around 16 modules to provide the same degree of flexibility as optional. The real problem here is that the variants of each of these projects are not really significant. I want users to depend on the concept of Joda-Time, and for them to pickup the benefits of Joda-Convert if they decide to refer to the module directly. It seems like there should be a way to represent this. Are there any plans to address optional dependencies? Stephen
