errorprone cannot be considered optional about gson HOT 4 CLOSED

The full text from the release notes is this:

• Added dependency on com.google.errorprone:error_prone_annotations
  This dependency can be considered optional, but if missing it might lead to compiler warnings. Therefore Gson does not declare it as optional.

Perhaps it could be worded a bit better, but to me this does explicitly say that the dependency is not optional.

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Yeah, no idea who wrote that or why

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Sorry, yes it was worded a bit misleading. What I meant by "can be considered optional" was:

You can in your project use Maven or Gradle dependency exclusions to remove the transitive error_prone_annotations dependency from Gson. Or if you are manually maintaining dependencies as JARs in your project you can omit error_prone_annotations. And it should still work correctly.

But Gson itself does declare it as required dependency, and if you don't perform any custom configuration, then Maven or Gradle will by default try to download error_prone_annotations and use it.

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I updated the release notes by copying the text from @Marcono1234's comment more or less verbatim. I think anyway that most users should not really care. There isn't in general an expectation that you will always be able to build Gson or a project using Gson using only the dependencies that you happen to have in your local Maven repository. Gson is unusual in that it doesn't have any other non-test dependencies, but we've never guaranteed that.

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