Vincent Massol wrote:
However, I would rather use http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/io/api-release/org/apache/commons/io/IOUti...) than code it ourselves... Sounds safer, shorter, less maintenance, etc to me... :)
If it adds value. I think that XWiki is plagued with different libraries doing the same thing or adding small amount of functionality. This makes it harder to analyse.
I'm not I would have used the word "plagued" which has a negative connotation... I would rather have said: "thanks to the effort of others in OSS we have been able to develop XWiki to a level we wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise... This allows us to reduce our maintenance efforts, our documentation efforts and our testing efforts..." :-)
Now if you notice 2 libraries used in XWiki that do the same thing let us know so that we can all decide if we want to remove one and only use one. I'd be in favor of that wherever possible.
I've noticed a few places myself where I think the wrong library was chosen IMO (like when we use Jakarta ECS for something completely unrelated). There are also places where the choice was historic: like using ORO when the Regex is now in JDK 1.4 (this has already been identified).
Other examples are Xerces and Xalan, which are also included in JDK. I think that you also have duplicate cache libraries. I can take some time to analyze this after I finish playing with curernt topic (Kerberos). Just to clarify: I'm working with SVN so I don't know are all these libraries actually distributed.
Another place where to avoid local encoding: some source code files contain French characters, which are messed up on non-8859-1 platforms.
Ah we need to track these down. Could you please let us know which files?
When I bump into again, I'll drop a message.