[Feedback]: Missing source/javadoc/kdoc jars in the maven releases

[kroegerama]

What's on your mind?

I think it would be a great idea to release source-jars and javadoc/kdoc-jars along the compiled binaries via MavenCentral.

For example here are only the .aar files. This makes it really hard to debug, because one cannot just "go to source" via the IDE.

When your users encounter problems, having access to the source code can help to better understand the library's behavior and pinpoint the cause of issues more easily. The online documentation is bad enough, so it really would help to at least be able to easily access the source code.

The SDK is open source after all. So why not distribute it correctly. I think this would make a lot of the developers happy :)

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[jennantilla]

@kroegerama thank you for this suggestion! We'll look into incorporating into a future release!

[michael-winkler]

@jennantilla Any update for this request?

[jinliu9508]

@kroegerama Thanks for the suggestion and for the detailed explanation of your workflow — we agree this is a quality-of-life improvement. We’ve updated our publishing setup and, starting with Android SDK v5.4.2, we now ship:

1. the main AAR,
2. a -sources.jar, and
3. a -javadoc.jar
   for the core Android SDK artifacts on Maven Central.

If you update your dependency to 5.4.2 or newer, re-sync your Gradle project, and have “Download sources and documentation” enabled in your IDE, you should be able to navigate into the SDK code and see the generated docs directly.

If you run into any issues with the new source/javadoc artifacts, please let us know and we can take another look.