Hello, >From a maven release perspective, I don't think there is significant benefit in publishing a fat/shaded jar of xtable-utilities. If we drop shading, the xtable-utilities jars should be rather minimal without special requirements for licensing. XTable consumers that want to use the xtable-utilities via maven will automatically get all transitive dependencies via maven's dependency resolution mechanism.
>From the user's perspective, a fat jar makes sense since it greatly simplifies execution using a simple java command. An alternative way to provide simplicity to the users is to gather dependencies in a lib directory during the build (using maven-assembly-plugin, maven-dependency-plugin, etc.) and instruct the users to run a script (usually in a bin directory) which is mostly there to manage the classpath. The main advantage of this approach is that 3-party binaries will not be published/released as Apache XTable code. In all cases we need to verify the licenses of our dependencies but if we don't mingle 3rd party binaries in Apache binaries things are significantly easier to document. Lastly there are various maven plugins (such as https://www.mojohaus.org/license-maven-plugin/) that can aid the LICENSE documentation and checks but from the moment that the project does not perform binary releases this is not strictly necessary. Best, Stamatis On Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 5:47 AM Jesus Camacho Rodriguez <jcama...@apache.org> wrote: > > Hello everyone, > > First, I'd like to thank Vinish for driving our first release as an ASF > project, which is often the most challenging one. > > Unfortunately, during the recent release vote on the incubator mailing > list, licensing issues in the xtable-utilities module were found [1]. > Honestly, I did not check licensing that carefully in our first release > because I assumed the WIP disclaimer [2] would allow us more flexibility to > address these issues in future releases. However, it appears that was not > the case, as discussed in the mailing list. > > We need to address these licensing concerns for the xtable-utilities > artifact for our release, but this requires considerable effort; Vinish has > outlined the plan in this GitHub issue [3]. > One suggestion provided in the thread was to exclude the xtable-utilities > bundle, at least from the initial releases, to simplify the process. > > I'm +1 on excluding it from the first releases, but I would also like to > discuss more broadly whether we should consider including it in future > releases in its current form or whether we should explore other options. > The bundle is quite large (over 600MB) and includes many artifacts, which > means that any changes in dependency versions in the future will require > close monitoring for licensing issues. I'd appreciate input from others, > especially if they have experience in similar situations, on how they think > we should proceed. > > Thanks, > Jesús > > [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread/pcs3c7dq6bljzxmwlcyrwns9ndbfd23g > [2] https://github.com/apache/incubator-xtable/blob/main/DISCLAIMER-WIP > [3] https://github.com/apache/incubator-xtable/issues/536
