What to do with 3rd party Javadoc

Question

Looking to see what others do with 3rd party (vendor) java documents? Do they get placed under source control so everyone can have access to them? Placed out on a local shared directory? other solutions that people have to work well.

We use clearcase and have developers spread out through the US along with a couple of off shore groups.

Answer 1

If you have some kind of intra/extranet available, I recommend collecting all of them there in one place. If you don't intend to modify them, I don't see any benefit in keeping them under version control.

Answer 2

We use Trac

With its Bugtracker and its Wiki it is easy to manage documents that you need for your project. In addition you have a lot of useful plugins for that tool. We do not put this type of documents in our version control cause it makes our projects to big after a while.

Answer 3

When you use the word 'document', I suppose you are talking about javadocs?

Projects that use Maven have it take care of such things.

For other projects, it is possible to have the external javadocs shared by:

• accessible on the web (just configure your environment to display them) : that's easy to set up, easy on resources, maybe be slow (or down) from time to time...
• accessible on a common file system : that is not always possible or practical (think about your offshore groups)
• committed in source control (possibly in a different place, so that common synchronizing tasks don't have to check them) : easy also ; might be a performance problem in some configurations

Answer 4

I add them to source control.

I have

• lib/ for 3rd party jar files
• lib-doc/ for 3rd party javadocs
• lib-src/ for 3rd party sources

I find this good for future reference, when I may need to find the source or docs for the specific version of the api that I use. It could be that in 6 months or 12 months time, the version I use is no longer publicly available.