javadoc.jar、sources.jar 和.jar 有什么区别？

Question

Looking at Google gson 2.8.5 , I see several jars are distributed herehttps://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/code/gson/gson/2.8.5/

• gson-2.8.5-javadoc.jar
• gson-2.8.5-sources.jar
• gson-2.8.5.jar

By reading other posts, I understand that sources.jar contains source code, but jar contains the compiled class files.

1. Does this mean that, given the sources.jar, I can generate the jar myself? What is the general relationship between these three jars?
2. What is javadoc.jar? Does it only contain documentation, or source code / compiled classes too?

Answer 1

Does this mean that, given the sources.jar, I can generate the jar myself?

Yes, you could extract the Java code from the sources.jar using the jar command.

Eg jar xf gson-2.8.5-sources.jar

And than compiling the Java files using javac .

But you need to have all the referenced dependencies in your classpath which are required when you call javac. These dependencies can be found in the project pom.xml

What is the general relationship between these three jars?

The .jar file contains the compliled code which is contained in the sources.jar. So using the sources.jar you could create the .jar yourself (as mentioned having the required dependencies). The javadoc.jar contains a static html site which content is extracted from all the javadocs which are present in the Java source files.