Quoting Marcus Better <marcus@better.se>:
Another issue: Maven projects tend to specify exact version of their dependencies. For building Debian packages, we need to get Maven to use whatever version we have in Debian (and just make sure it's recent enough).
Hi all!I apologize if the following questions and suggestion sound silly to you. I do not know that much about pacakging .. but I know a bit more about Java and Maven..
There is a problem with this approach that I do not understand how Debian packaging deals with anyway. In many Java projects I have seen it is quite important to use the exact version of the libraries. The Maven repository concept allows for a folder structure that keeps things together and allows different versions of the same libraries to live side by side peacefully. How does this work in Debian?
From what I can tell looking at the Debian libraries for Java some use a version number and some don't. I think that should be changed so that all libraries have to have a version number in their file name and package names and allow mutliple versions to live peacefully side by side.
Otherwise it will be near impossible to get a lot of different programs using the libraries without major headaches. Either from a QA and packaging perspective if we use other versions that upstream or otherwise from conflicts between differnet packages requiring different versions of libraries.
As far as I can tell the problem exists because many libraries do dramatic changes to their API quite regularly ..
manfred