topic Patched jars again in Alfresco Archive

Patched jars again

valery_antonov — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 15:49:28 GMT

Hi!In 5.0.c, I've count 13 of them, for me its not good.. Some contains new functionality other parts of alfresco depends on - for example, patched poi-xml contains AlfrescoPoiPatchUtils, and this class is used in PoiMetadataExtracter. I think this is is exactly what is called "bad architecture"AFAI

Re: Patched jars again

mrogers — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:08:00 GMT

Ideally we wouldn't have any parched jars. However it is often necessary. And we only reluctantly patch things.

Do you have any specific points ?

And yes both antlr versions are required. However perhaps not for much longer.

Re: Patched jars again

valery_antonov — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 09:49:32 GMT

What is normal scenario

1 We found a critical bug in POI 3.10.1, posted it and made a patch
2 In 3.11 this bug is fixed (I hope) , so we could safely swith back to unpatched version

Here is another story - patched POI contains added functionality from Alfresco (AlfrescoPoiPatchUtils). It means we cant switch to the new version - we pinned to that exact patched jar. In several month, no one could remember what and why exactly was done, so it'll be left as is. acegi-security-0.8.2_patched.jar is a good example, it looks like a tombstone …

In our projects we need to add dependencies to alfresco - java dependencies are always pain in the neck, but with patched jars it is even harder, tons of <exclusions> in POM's etc

I understand that it is hard to stop to add new features, but imho from time to time some cleanup is needed, or we will finish with yet another Documentum