libcommons-lang-java is incorrectly marked as a dependency of libcommons-cli-java

[picomancer]

I'm writing a Java program and I want to use Apache Commons command line parser. I install libcommons-cli-java like this:

$ sudo apt-get install libcommons-cli-java

...
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libcommons-lang-java
...

But none of the code in libcommons-cli-java requires libcommons-lang-java to run. You can easily see this by doing the following:

    mkdir temp
    cd temp
    jar xvf /usr/share/java/commons-cli-1.2.jar
    find . -type f | xargs strings | grep lang | grep -v java/lang
    find . -type f | xargs strings | grep org.apache.commons.lang

(NB class names are actually in class files as org/apache/commons/lang, but the dot character is actually a wildcard in grep, so this command actually does search for what I claim it searches for)

You can see the only occurrence of the string "lang" is in the license; the class files only contain references to java.lang (Java language builtins). There is no mention of org.apache.commons.lang (the Java package provided by libcommons-lang-java)!

Someone should probably report this bug to Debian, since Debian seems to suffer from this problem as well -- see http://packages.debian.org/sid/libcommons-cli-java

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for reporting.

I've created a patch for this issue and forwarded to Debian.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

The dependency was removed in 1.3.1-3 which has landed in Debian unstable. Since this package carries some Ubuntu-specific changes, it looks like it will need a merge to get the fix into Ubuntu as well though.

[Emmanuel Bourg (ebourg)]

Fixed in xenial.