While climbing some learning curves on the Android smartphone app platform, I learned about ProGuard, http://proguard.sourceforge.net/ , which among other things appears to shrink Jars by removing unused code, and doing various optimizations. (It also can do obfuscation, but that I don't think would be appropriate for an open source project :-) ).
Some optimizations / shrinkages are described here http://proguard.sourceforge.net/#results.html The run-time classes from Oracle's Java 6 shrunk 53 M to 22 M. Apache Ant shrunk from 2.4M to 325K. I wonder what it would do on our binary distributions... -Marshall
