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On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:05:08 +0000, Nicolas Rodriguez wrote:
> On 12/15/2010 08:11 AM, Andreas Draeger wrote:
>> Dear Mike, Nico, and all,
>>
>>> JUnit: Common Public License
>> Do you think we're going to deliver JUnit with JSBML? I think this
>> library is needed for testing purposes only, right?
>>
> Yes, but people want to be able to run the tests, I think.
>
> May be, when we do the one big jar, we could remove junit and the test
> classes but otherwise
> we could put all the librairies under svn in the distribution ?

I agree that people will want to run the tests, but one thing to note is that junit seems to be already available on a lot of systems. For systems where it's not necessarily installed by default, it seems easy to install using (e.g.) modern package managers that come with Ubuntu, MacPorts, etc. So in the particular case of junit, I also do wonder if it needs to be included in svn. (With the exception of log4j, all the other libraries are far less common, and are really worth keeping local copies of.)

You're no doubt aware that there are tradeoffs with keeping local copies of any given dependency. One benefit is that you're assured of getting the API you expect, even if development of a library has proceeded and things have changed in the latest distribution. OTOH, you don't get the benefit of updates and bug fixes. Sometimes by keeping a local copy of something, it's easy to forget that one is using a many-years-old copy of a library and that newer versions exist.

I guess the action items here might be the following:

1) Evaluate if junit is common enough to leave out of svn.
2) If not, use the approach Nicolas suggests: keep it in svn, but don't ship it in the released product.

MH
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