Message9173

I did look at shrinking built jars using the keep rule for the jarjar task. This will be substantially more difficult than initially anticipated because keep means keep only classes of a certain pattern, so we have to enumerate all of these, taking in account dynamic loading. (I could not readily build a Jython that would even start up.) In addition, ICU4J, which is the real issue in terms of recent additions, does not shrink very much (maybe 10% maximum out of 10M) because most of it is composed of data files, not classes.

The one way I could see this possibly working is to use intermediate steps - build stripped versions of extlibs jars (maybe with a sub jarjar task per stripped jar), then do final linkage with the shading step provided by the jarjar task. We could also see what data files are really necessary from ICU4J, using exclusion patterns.