josm vs josm-installer
The josm-installer package was just accepted after some time in NEW.
It was created to have an alternative for the josm package if it became
impossible to build it from source using the embedded copies of several
of its dependencies.
JOSM 16239 is the first tested snapshot which uses Ivy to download its
dependencies which were removed from the JOSM source tree in Subversion.
Because we rely on several of the embedded copies to be able to provide
backports of josm for stable users, it looked quite infeasible to keep
josm in Debian initially.
Thanks to the work of the JOSM developers we were able to keep the josm
package in Debian as it now users the source JAR with the same version
of the dependencies as those used by the upstream build.
The josm-installer package doesn't build JOSM from source as the name
implies, it downloads the JAR provided by the JOSM project instead. Like
the josm package it uses the 'tested' variant by default, but the
josm-installer script has an option to download the 'latest' variant
instead.
Because apt can't be used to update the josm-installer package to a new
JOSM tested snapshot (or latest for that matter), a systemd service and
timer are used to periodically download the JAR.
The josm-installer package is in contrib because it requires software
outside of the distribution to function. For that reason the josm
package remains the preferred way to install JOSM on Debian systems, but
users now also have easy way to have the 'latest' JOSM variant on their
system with the same desktop integration as the josm package.
Kind Regards,
Bas
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