One can presumably disable such minor warnings in Eclipse. Arguably the bug is that Eclipse warns about such things by default, rather than in a 'pedantic' mode.
I agree -- some of them are really annoying. Plus, Eclipse has been having notorious problems showing warnings for unused parameters in overriden methods... But I still think some of the warnings can be valuable and your idea with PMD is a good one.
One caution: we have run into problems where includes were removed because a tool said they were unused, but they were required for the Javadoc. So code-analysis tools are not infallible!
Eclipse deals with these properly -- I use it all the time. I believe it also shows warnings for classes referenced in JavaDocs and not imported.
I would not be opposed to integrating PMD or something similar into Nutch's build.xml. What do others think? Any volunteers?
I'll do it. I meant to see PMD anyway so it'll be a good exercise. D.
