Hi -

> On Aug 27, 2025, at 9:47 AM, PJ Fanning <fannin...@apache.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> poi-ooxml-full is made up of generated classes. XMLBeans is used to
> generate code based on many XML schemas. This doesn't change much. The
> code generation is slow and the compilation is slow. We are wasting
> developer time and machine time constantly rebuilding it.
> We used to ship this as an ooxml-schemas jar that had its own release
> cycle. I think it was a mistake to switch away from this.
> I propose this:
> * Create a new git repo for poi-ooxml-full build
> * We create a way to generate a source release for this repo
> (basically creating a tar.gz with the contents of the git repo at a
> point in time).
> * We release a poi-ooxml-full 5.5.0 source release and jar.
> * We base all poi 5.5.x releases on poi-ooxml-full 5.5.0 jar.
> * We end up with having separate votes for poi-ooxml-full releases
> (separate to the main POI ones).

+1!

> 
> At some point in the future, we can discuss the possibilities around
> moving poi-ooxml-lite to the the poi-ooxml-full release schedule. This
> is also an expensive part of the POI build that doesn't need to be
> rerun so often.
> This would involve small tweaks to the existing poi build.
> * The poi-ooxml test run would publish a list of xsb and class files
> that we need (it basically does this already)
> * We can copy those list files to the poi-ooxml-full repo and its
> build is modified to also generate a pi-ooxml-lite jar with the subset
> of the poi-ooxml-full xsb and class files.
> It may be feasible to do this poi-ooxml-lite work before a first
> poi-ooxml-full release.

It was at Apachecon NA 2009 Oakland when Jukka from Apache Tika approached 
Nick, Yegor, and I while we were hacking on POI with an issue that POI’s OOXML 
was great but a 13 MB jar was too big for Tika. Yegor created the OOXML Lite 
approach which made for a much smaller JAR.

The OOXML full jar is about 20 MB now and OOXML Lite is slightly smaller than 
10MB. In our modern world this difference in size is inconsequential.

I think that we should stop producing the OOXML Lite.

> 
> What do people think?

Great discussion!

Best,
Dave


> 
> Thanks,
> PJ
> 
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