Bug#856693: Drop ant dependency

[tony mancill]

On Sat, Mar 04, 2017 at 01:30:47AM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Source: libapache-poi-java
> Version: 3.10.1-3
> Severity: important
> 
> libapache-poi-java is an indirect dependency of libreoffice, so pulled
> in on every desktop installation.
> 
> Having a build tool like ant being pulled because of a library
> dependency is unwanted in such a case. Please consider dropping the
> dependency on ant.

Hi Michael,

Thank you for noticing this.  I agree that it look odd.  However, the
apache-poi sources use classes from ant.jar - for example, refer to the
classes in this package [1] - and currently that jar is shipped along
with the ant package.  I question whether it would worth it, but if this
were causing a serious issue, we could discuss splitting ant into
something like "ant-bin" (maybe there's a better name) and libant-java,
so only the latter library package is a dependency of
libapache-poi-java.  

In that case, I think we would still want to have an "ant" package that
depended on both the library and the "ant-bin" cli build tools that are
found in /usr/bin and /usr/share/ant/bin.  Perhaps another reason to
consider a split is because ant depends on a JRE (although I think
you're going to need one anyway in order to do anything useful with
apache-poi).

But in terms of overhead, I don't think there's anything to be concerned
about, because the ant wrapper scripts are tiny when compared to the jar
file itself:

$ du -sh /usr/share/ant/bin
40K	/usr/share/ant/bin

$ du -shL /usr/share/java/ant.jar
2.0M	/usr/share/java/ant.jar

So this seems more like a question of style.  Do you still think the
severity is important?

Cheers,
tony

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-java/libapache-poi-java.git/tree/src/excelant/java/org/apache/poi/ss/excelant
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