Re: Use of 3rd party libraries

[David Van Couvering]

I like code reuse rather than having to write and maintain our own work. 
 That's a big pull of open source is building from what others have 
done.  I vote for including the libraries in derby.jar, rather than 
having jar-file explosion.

One concern is making sure we include third-party stuff with compatible 
licensing.  What is the process for making we don't get into some legal 
tangle?

David
Jeremy Boynes wrote:
I would like to raise the issue of using 3rd party libraries with Derby.
For example, in another thread we are talking about command line 
interfaces. Traditionally Derby has implemented all its own parsing for 
this included in the main or tool jar. A lot of other Apache projects 
use commons-cli which is a small (<32k) library that implements this 
functionality; using this would save coding but create an external 
dependency.

I would be interested in the community's view on using this type of 
library code. Should we:

a) stick with what is done now and use our own versions
b) use external libraries and require the user to make sure they are
   available (e.g. are on the classpath)
c) use external libraries and a manifest class-path entry to ensure
   they are included
d) have the build include the library content in derby.jar
e) some other alternative
--
Jeremy