I have now been party to the Commons Codec project being used in two non-Jakarta projects, Apache Maven and Apache XML-RPC. In both, the only reason it is desirable is the Base64 codec, and in both cases the communities involved are grudgingly introducing a dependency on commons-codec. I have seen members of both projects propose just copying the source code and reusing that instead of requiring a runtime dependency on the jar.
In order to promote the reuse of commons-codec instead of the source-code-copy reuse strategy, I propose modifying the codec build to create certain additional artifacts that might be more palatable to developers in this situation. I envision a commons-codec.jar including everything the current one does, a commons-codec-api.jar including just the common interfaces, a commons-codec-base64.jar including only Base64.class, etc. It could easily be done with the maven reactor, and I volunteer to do the work. Since I am not a commons committer, I wanted to get some of your feelings on this before I plunge in. Are there any disadvantages to this approach I have missed?
I cross-posted to xmlrpc-dev to get the rest of the team's input on this as well.
-- Ryan Hoegg ISIS Networks http://www.isisnetworks.net/
