Let Jikes (finally) go into testing on its own...
Hi!
Please take a look at http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?excuse=jikes
which says: "149 days old (needed 2 days)" !!!
Current unstable version is 1.18-6, but testing is still at 1.15-2 !
The problem is known, I pointed it out here at least once. Jikes
provides all these wrappers jikes-* for different JVMs. This makes the
source package dependant on ALL these JVMs. The result is that if ANY
[*] them has problems going into testing - jikes has this problem too.
The proposal here (official) is that we remove all these wrappers
from jikes as they actually belong to the respective JVMs.
These JVMs are encouraged and free to move these one-file wrappers to
their own packages (which in turn will probably Depend: on jikes or
make it Recommend: and make wrappers fail gracefully or sth. like that).
I seek for seconds for this proposal, especially from the jikes
maintainer (who should be the one most interested in having jikes in
testing anyway). If people are busy - I can do the NMU.
The question that remains is whether we keep these wrappers as separate
packages, on which things can depend, or integrate them into JVMs.
I belive that archive maintainers would very much prefer having them
integrated to lower archive bloat (a .deb file that actually contains
ONE useful file?!). And then respective JVMs can also provide
java-compiler if they provide the wrapper.
However this decision could be left at the discretion of respective JVMs
package maintainers. Either they stick w/ having separate package that
provides java-compiler, or they make JVM packages provide java-compiler.
Though I'd personally prefer to have it agreed upon and implemented
consistently.
In any case having jikes'es fate bound to the state ALL JVMs are - is
something that should be removed ASAP, especially that we're about
to release.
Cheers,
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
[*] This is completly irrelevant that jikes is currently held by
Kaffe. Tomorrow it may be held by SableVM, and in a week by Classpath
or GIJ.
PS: There's also an against-Policy bug in jikes.
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-main
Debian Policy 2.2.1 The main section says:
"...package must not declare a "Depends", "Recommends", or
"Build-Depends" relationship on a non-main package"
while jikes has:
Recommends: jikes-gij | jikes-kaffe | jikes-sun | jikes-classpath |
jikes-sablevm
where jikes-sun is in the contrib section. This should probably be
changed to Suggests: jikes-sun or removed altogether.
This is at least a serious bug (or maybe rather a grave/RC, as there's
"must not" in the Policy) so we need an upload anyway.
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPLed JVM http://www.sablevm.org
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