[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#915065: starjava-vo: Unused dependency on libaxis-java

[Emmanuel Bourg]

Source: starjava-vo
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

starjava-vo has a dependency on libaxis-java but it actually builds fine
without it. It uses a SOAP client from starjava-registry [1] that used to
be based on Axis but no longer use it as highlighted by this comment in
the SoapClient class:

 /**
  * Lightweight, freestanding SOAP client which can make simple requests
  * and allows the responses to be processed as a SAX stream.
  * Logging of sent and received XML can optionally be performed by
  * using the {@link #setEchoStream} method.
  * Probably, there is much of SOAP that this doesn't implement, but
  * it works well enough to write a registry client on top of it.
  *
  * <p>Why write yet another SOAP client?  Last time I tried to get Axis
  * to do this (stream processing of the response) it took me several
  * days of misery, and still didn't work.  The actual job I need to
  * do here is quite straightforward, so it's not difficult to write it
  * from scratch.
  *
  * @author   Mark Taylor
  * @since    9 Dec 2009
  */

Since we plan to request the removal of libaxis-java due to compatibility
issues with Java 11 (#911187), could you please remove the libaxis-java
dependency from starjava-vo?

Thank you,

Emmanuel Bourg

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian-astro-team/starjava-registry/blob/master/src/main/uk/ac/starlink/registry/SoapClient.java