Re: RFC: provides: java-servlet-engine

[Stefan Gybas <stefan@gybas.com>]

Thom May wrote:

> I'm putting together a package for cocoon, which is a java
> servlet that serves xml pages.

Do you know that there is already a Cocoon package in Debian (although
it's an old version)?

> So, in the control file i'd like to be able to specify "requires:
> java-servlet-engine" and let apt get on with it, rather than
> saying "requires: apache-jserv|tomcat" etc.

I don't think you will gain much from this in case of JServ and Tomcat:
If you want to automatically set up the servlet engine in your postinst
so that *.xml files are passed to the Cocoon servlet, you have to modify
the servlet engine's configuration file. But these files are substantially
different for JServ (a plain text file) and Tomcat (an XML file) - so
you have to deal with all known servlet engines in your postinst anyway.
And why would we need a package if it just puts coccon.jar in
/usr/share/java and declares a dependency on a servlet engine?

I will ask the ftp admins to remove jserv and gnujsp from the archives
as soon as woody has been released (i.e. they will not be in woody+1).
Both JServ and Tomcat are in contrib but Tomcat implements the newer
servlet specification 2.2 so it can fully repleace JServ and GNUJSP.

-- 
Stefan Gybas