Why patching the org.apache.commons.lang plugin is necessary

As part of the core Lotus Expeditor framework a number of Apache Jakarta Commons libraries are supplied as plugins. Unfortunately the org.apache.commons.lang plugin is incorrectly packaged which means that developers cannot reuse code from this library. This goes for all Notes 8 releases so far (Notes 8.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2 beta 1, 8.0.2 beta 2, 8.5 beta 1).

The problem is that the plugin manifest file (MANIFEST.MF) doesn’t export all the packages of the library but only the root package. The *right* thing would be to export all the packages (e.g. org.apache.commons.lang.exception, org.apache.commons.lang.math etc.)

Luckily the problem is quite easy to fix and it will be in upcoming releases. For now, as a developer, the easy way to solve the problem is to simply modify the manifest by unzipping the plugin, changing the MANIFEST.MF file and rezipping the plugin back up. I have done this on all my machines and will be supplying a patched version of the plugins so you can run TwitNotes 1.0.5 on these releases.

Patching this plug-in wont affect other code in my eyes.