Jan Schulz wrote:
I just wanted to know what direction. I'm not suggesting to discussthe things word by word...
I've collected some suggestions for building Java package at http://pkg-java.alioth.debian.org/building.html. I think some of them (e.g. to use a well-defined class path) should become policy when they have proven to be practical.
I've also come to the conclusion that adding the version number to JARs in /usr/share/java/ is a bad idea. Take for example libxercres2-java: If you've used /usr/share/java/xercesImpl-2.3.0.jar in another package and then upgraded to Xerces-J 2.4.0 your package will not work any longer. You would have to use a version package dependency on libxerces2-java, but then you can simply use /usr/share/java/xercesImpl.jar directly. Appending the version would only make sense if the package name also contained the version so you could install multiple versions at the same time. BTW, I've not seen any package that usees the versioned JAR - so it obviously is not useful.
Stefan