[infinispan-dev] Cutting down on dependencies

[Sanne Grinovero]

I'm starting from the most obvious place: looking for unused dependencies.

Some dependencies are declared in the parent pom.xml, but it turns out
nobody actually needed them :-)
I'm trying to remove them all, one by one.. a slow background process
as I want the full testsuite to complete for each removal.

It would be easier if no dependency whatsoever was added to the parent
pom; for example we also have a situation in which we would like to
test:

 # if anything works without any transactionmananager available on classpath
 # that Log4J is really optional (will it blow up at runtime if it's not there?)
 # I need a specific module to _not_ have TestNG on classpath because
of conflicts

None of these are possible as these dependencies (Log4j, Narayana,
TestNG) are mandated globally.

I'm working to gradually remove all global dependencies from the
parent pom: modules which need them should declare them explicitly.
Please support me by never ever adding any global dependency to the parent?

Essentially I think no jar belongs there, but we could make an
exception for things like net.jcip:jcip-annotations.

Cheers,
Sanne