Re: Vive la Revolution! (Re: Classpath and versioned libraries for Debian-Java)
On 0, Jeff Turner <jeff@socialchange.net.au> wrote:
> How about using the jar manifest to store the jar metadata, as Sun
> intended? Make the jars their own database. A platform-independent
> database :)
Jeff, your idea sounds nice, and I would really like to see Debian define the new Java manifest file standard, but I see several problems:
Your idea requires the license of any library to allow us to unjar their .JAR file, add something to the manifest file, and jar it again.. I don't know if that will be a problem. It's somehow derived work, but on the other hand, the library (the code) itself is still the same, and I think a manifest file cannot be protected by copyright law (I only know the copyright law in Germany).
If this licensing stuff is really a problem, we can't take advantage of your idea, because it makes no sense to distribute some JAR files with an "extended" manifest, and others have their meta information in separate files.
> - It delegates maintenance of some metadata to the upstream source.
> Most importantly, dependencies. See Adam Heath's rant in a separate
> thread, and think of how this could solve the problem.. ;)
It's dangerous to delegate critical stuff like dependencies to upstream. Only we know what package should get which name, e.g. xalan for Xalan 1.x and xalan2 for Xalan 2.0 and 2.1. The library authors would have to know our policy and accept it - you can't demand that. Other people may have a very different idea about that. You also can't let dpkg and java-common deal with broken dependency declarations of someone who just wants to publish his library and does not care much about the Debian people (which is nothing we can blame him for).
> with online jar catalogs, ontologies, etc. Ideally, the system could be
> submitted as a JSR, and the common tools become part of the JDK.
Well, we can propose a new standard, and see if it gets widely adopted. We have to write a policy anyway, why not publish it as general proposal for the whole Java platform. It happened more than once that other Linux distributors refer to a Debian policy.
Regards,
Max
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