duplicate jars in distribution

[clinton]

Hello, do the good folk at konakart consider the duplicate jars inside the zip distribution to be a problem?

Removing these duplicates will eliminate a potential source of error as well as shave dozens of Megabytes off the overall file size.

I understand this is probably done for convenience and because "disk space is cheap" but given the distribution file size has now exceeded 100Mb you might want to consider a mitigation strategy for the future.

Eg: com.ibm.icu_3.8.1.v20080530.jar exists under konakart/webapps/birtviewer/WEB-INF twice... 4.1Mb
4 instances of axis.jar
3 instances of db2jcc.jar
3 instances of ojdbc14.jar
All of the above are over 1Mb each. So if you were to reduce all the duplicates above that's an immediate saving of approx 14Mb.

One possible way to manage this would be to define some sort of common directory and let the install procedures make copies of the files.  And/or use ant to manage the dependencies. 

Just a suggestion.

[greg]

Thanks for your post and suggestions.

We certainly ship more jars than are strictly necessary (eg. jars to support all 5 dbs) but we think that at the cost of a larger download and greater disk usage, it's worthwhile to make KonaKart easier to work with.

If a KonaKart user really wants to move the shared jars to common areas in their container they can to minimise the disk footprint.

Sometimes people want to create WARs of their webapps and move them to other containers...  if we don't duplicate the jars for these it can make that process a little more complicated.

Unnecessary duplication is a waste however and we'll look at the duplication of the com.ibm.icu_3.8.1.v20080530.jar file to see why that was done... and if it's unnecessary we'll remove it for the next release.  We'll also look at improving the installler to work with single copies of the jars.

[Brian]

Just an update on this one...

We have improved the packaging in the next release to eliminate the duplicate jars in the download kit.  The result has been a reduction in size of the install kits by about 20Mg so a very beneficial change.

Thanks, Clinton, for the suggestion.