Additional files (README and CHANGES) published in META-INF

[anthonymonori]

While this can always be filtered out in the consumer side, I find it unnecessary that jsoup ends up putting the README.md and CHANGES in the META-INF folder, resulting in additional 17.4 KB (aprox) extra space.

https://github.com/jhy/jsoup/blob/master/pom.xml#L233-L234

Is there any specific reason why is this being done on purpose? LICENSE file I may understand (although I don't seem to get that -- probably something our android build tools filters out), but not the other two.

Would you consider removing those? Or you see it as something to be done by the users of the library in their use cases?

[jhy]

The jar is the canonical published artifact. Yes, I want those files there.

[mateuszkwiecinski]

I just stumbled upon the same issue when realized my APKs also contains these files 👀
They take ~24kb now :/

Would it be possible to somehow improve the experience for Android devs? Can this library publish some additional Proguard/R8 rules, so it gets automatically optimized when shrinking an apk with R8?

And out of curiosity: what's the purpose of these files? Are there any tools that read jar content and parse it later? Isn't LICENSE information already included in pom file?

[anthonymonori]

Hey @mateuszkwiecinski

For now, you can exclude them yourself during packaging of the aab/apk by adding the following to your app's build.gradle.kts (or equivalent in Groovy)

android {
    //...
    packagingOptions {
        resources {
            excludes.addAll(listOf("META-INF/README.md", "META-INF/CHANGES")) // https://github.com/jhy/jsoup/issues/1666
        }
    }
}

[mateuszkwiecinski]

Thanks. That's what I did actually :)
Although, my concern was it's not obvious every Android project, using this great library, should have such configuration added. So I started wondering if it could be improved. Maybe there is a way to publish R8/Proguard configuration in a way this resources could be removed while shrinking?