Re: Large-scale java policy violations
Ola Lundqvist wrote:
Yes it bothers me too. What bothers me more is that someone (I
do not remember who) told me that I should name my package
libxalan2-java instead of lib-xalan2-java.
This was probably me. I had a long discussion with Stephane Bortzmeyer
(original author of the Java policy) about this, but I don't remember if
it was on this list or in private mails.
Anyway, the initial idea behind lib-XXX-java was to use the Java package
name, e.g. org.w3c.dom would be in a Debian package called
lib-org.w3c.dom-java. However, more and more Java software with classes
in different Java packages was released, so this was not suitable any
longer.
I then decided for my packages to use libXXX-java for libraries where
XXX is the name of the product/project, e.g. libxerces-java. Real
applications, i.e. not just JARs, like Tomcat were just named after
the project. These also depended on java-virtual-machine instead of just
java-common in the case of Java libraries.
About the version: I'm not sure if it makes sense to include the version
in the package name. It might be appropriate in some cases, e.g. I'm
thinking about packaging Xerces 2.0 as libxerces2-java so Xerces 1.x and
2.x can both be installed at the same time, but I don't see what we could
gain from libxerces1.3.1-java, libxerces1.4.1-java, ...
A different story is the naming of JARs inside the package. It might make
sense to include the version there, so instead of
/usr/share/java/xerces.jar I could use /usr/share/java/xerces-1.4.1.jar
and create a symlink or using alternatives. But then some suggestions
like automatically including all jars in /usr/share/java to the default
classpath cause duplicate and conflicting classes.
Summary: I'm for using libXXX-java instead of lib-XXX-java (and with the
exception ofg libpgjava I'm already doing this) and I thing the version
number should be allowed in the package but not enforced. So we end up
with library packages named lib<projectname>[<version>]-java. Packages
containing applications (i.e. shell startup scripts in /usr/bin) should
just be named after the application without -java appended.
If everybody agrees to this scheme, I'll rename libpgjava (which was
created before there has even been a discussion about a Java policy) to
libpostgresql-java.
--
Stefan Gybas
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