1. People installing a VM do not need to install jikes so first one is out.
I agree with that, as I said before.
True, but those packages would only be three at most, and only temporary (if we can remove after sarge, then that's a few weeks/months).2. The entire point of putting wrappers in the source package of anotherpackage (like a compiler, or JVM), is to not bloat the /pool with stupid little 20 byte sources.
BTW, it should be possible to create only one new source package, jikes-wrappers, that contains the three dummy wrappers to force upgrade. Which somewhat diminishes the cost (in terms of number of packages) of this solution.
Not ideal, but epochs are not ideal either:
Yes, that makes it nice for users, but creates confusion for packagers. Given that info, you'd think you can put a Build-depends: jikes (>= 1.15-2), but that won't do what you expect it to do...Increasing the epoc should not be a problem since epoc is generally not used upstream. The version does not look any different in dselect, __ Opt devel jikes <none> 1.15-2 Fast Java compiler...
I agree the extra source packages are a bigger pain that will be temporary, while the epoch solution is a mild pain that will last forever.
Cheers, Daniel