Question

I have a small Utility library containing some useful utility methods which have been fully unit-tested. At the moment, my library has no external dependencies. I am toying with the idea of adding logging to my classes which might be useful for debugging purposes. But this would mean bundling logging libraries along with my project.

My question is: should I keep my library dependency free? Are there any advantages of doing so?

Answer 1

Pro:

• Your library will be much smaller (chances are that you’re only using a small part of the full functionality of any dependency)
• No update hell (like your code needs library C, version 2, product X needs your code and library C, version 1).
• You won’t need to bend your spoon to the whims of someone else (say the library you goes from 1.x to 2.x -> you need to update your code)

Con:

• Wasted code if product X also needs the library
• How smart are you? Chances are that you can’t match the thought, wisdom and time that already went into the library.

PS: If you want to support logging, add slf4j to your code; this is a 30KiB API which allows users of your code to use any logging framework out there. Do not use commons-logging.