In the case when a member of the community wants to submit a patch to enhance some core Ant functionality, and needs some simple helper class that may already exist in another Apache or Jakarta project (such as commons), AND the changes are too fundamentally embedded in existing code to make the helper class optional, what would be the best thing to do?
a) write a new class just for Ant (maybe refactoring existing Ant classes along the way)
duplicates effort
b) add a version of the other class to Ant's src structure
makes maintenance hard
c) add the other project as a dependency
It is considered bad form to add a new dependency to existing code, as it breaks things and users are unhappy.
...what, if any, additional caveats should be observed in whichever is deemed the correct choice?
There is no correct choice. If you look how new stuff has been tacked into existing code, people often end up using reflection to make the new features optional, rather than mandatory.
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