[Building Sakai] Base64 encoding/decoding and the org.sakaiproject.util.commonscodec package

[Seth Theriault]

Matthew Buckett wrote:

> Although putting commons codec into shared might reduce 
> memory usage a little and mean we don't have to update our 
> copy at all it does introduce another dependency that all 
> the tools have to coordinate on.
> 
> I don't think they are re-implementations, but are just 
> copies from an apache project with their package names 
> changes to not conflict with the originals.

Our copies of these classes are old; in fact, they seem to 
pre-date the 1.3 release made back in 2004. In addition, we 
are not making updates to these classes based on bug fixes 
such as CODEC-61, new method additions such as CODEC-59 or 
CODEC-69, etc. from either 1.4 or the official 1.3 release. 
This makes these classes fragile and out of date.

> Having the packaged renamed classes means tools can pull in 
> whatever version they want and breaking api changes in 
> commons-codec don't cause problems for us (unlikely I know).

Few if any tools are using these classes, and then only for 
the most basic operations. People seem to be already 
consciously using "official" commons-codec classes for BASE64 
operations in lieu of the org.sakaiproject ones and are 
therefore "exposed" to any (unlikely) API changes.

Seth