Hi Everyone, I just did a quick check of stats of downloads of the optional modules in Groovy 3 with a view to considering possible changes for Groovy 4. I just looked at downloads over the last week and only for Groovy 3.
Results as percentage of overall downloads: groovy-dateutil 74.9% groovy-yaml 15.1% groovy-cli-commons 5.5% groovy-jaxb 2.4% groovy-bsf 2.2% I think we can make the observation that groovy-dateutil is still in widespread use. Despite the newer JSR-310 date/time classes, the legacy ones are still important. We could consider adding them back into groovy-all. PROs: simpler inclusion, won't affect projects already explicitly mentioning the module CONs: slightly noisier classpath for projects not wanting those classes but they can exclude, it might look like we can't make up our mind, there might be slightly less incentive for users to upgrade to the newer classes which have many advantages It seems that there is enough interest in YAML that it should also be included in groovy-all. PROs: simpler inclusion, won't affect projects already explicitly mentioning the module CONs: slightly noisier classpath for projects not wanting YAML but they can exclude I haven't checked download numbers (and perhaps moot since it isn't optional) but I was leaning towards adding groovy-testng to optional modules for Groovy 4. There seems less interest in that technology since JUnit 5. In my view, groovy-servlet, groovy-jmx and groovy-docgenerator would be other candidates to add to the optional list. Note: we have split out the legacy AstBuilder classes (well more accurately the global transform associated with them) into a groovy-astbuilder module in Groovy 3. We have already ear-marked that as optional for Groovy 4. We encourage people to use the groovy-macro classes instead. I would be interested in others' thoughts. Cheers, Paul.
