Patched jars again

[valery_antonov]

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"

AFAIR great work was done to remove outdated functionality, but still myfaces*, spring-social* etc are in the libs, is this still used? antlr-2.7.7.jar and antlr-3.5.2.jar both in the libs…


BTW, I cant mark this thread as 5.0.c-related

[mrogers]

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.

[valery_antonov]

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