Re: Java policy draft; a road map proposal...
Hello list,
Having read the new Draft page, read again another time many pages on the
wiki, in the Java FAQ and in the Java Policy, the java-common bugs, I still
stay with the feeling that there is no clear roadmap for Java in Debian,
beginning with the Java Policy.
Information is available, here and there, but is frequently obsolete and
scattered in numerous places. Experiments and prototypes have been done to
solve the CLASSPATH problem, for instance, but no clear and "best" solution
has been promoted in the Policy. For years, there have been discussions on
debian-java, but the best ideas have not always been promoted in the Java
Policy or Java FAQ.
Compared with other policies, the Java Policy appears as an alpha draft, with
many missing information, either for the Java developper or the Java
packager. In this email, I've tried to create the structure of a new Java
Policy. My goal was to list all the points that should appear in a complete
and extensive Java Policy. There are probably missing ones, and the
discussions on the list will pinpoint them and add them to this content list.
I expect at least 50% changes!
I've tried to be exhaustive in the contents list, at least to give to the
future reader or to debian-java discussions the impression that the point has
not been missed. Writing that something is irrelevant is richer information
than lack of reference. Or for reference to external sources of information.
Also, one of the first step is to define precisely the scope of the Java
Policy. As the group of Java developpers and packagers on Debian is more
limited than for languages like PHP or Perl, I thought that the Java Policy
had to be more practical than the equivalent policies for these languages,
and include information that we would expect in a Developper Guide. So I have
created this table of contents in the spirit of listing the best practices
for Java Developpers _and_ Packagers. The Java FAQ will remain complementary
for how-to information or beginners questions; and the wiki for fast moving
ideas or experiments...
Then, with a complete Java Policy Table of Contents, we should been able to
fill in the text between the headers, consolidating the information already
in the Wiki, debian-java and the bugs system, and of course the present Java
Policy draft.
I think that having a common structured road map for the Java Policy will help
to achieve this long standing graal of Java use on Debian. What do you think?
-- Pierre Métras
Proposed Java Policy table of contents
1 About this manual
1.2 Scope
1.2.3 Java packages interface definition
1.2.4 Best practices for packagers and developpers
1.3 New versions of this document
1.4 Authors and Maintainers
1.4.3 How to submit updates
1.5 Related documents
1.6 Terms and conventions
2 The Debian Archive
2.2 The package name
2.3 Main, contrib or non-free
2.4 Virtual packages
2.5 Packages relationships
2.6 Subsections
2.7 Tags
3 Binary packages
3.2 Versions and Sun versionning
3.3 User interaction
4 The Operating System
4.2 File system hierarchy
4.2.3 Libraries
4.2.4 Applications
4.2.5 Web applications
4.2.6 Pluggins
4.2.7 Applets
4.3 Environment variables
4.4 Architecture independance
4.5 binfmt_misc registration
4.6 Menus
4.7 Documents associations
4.8 MIME types
5 Virtual Machines
5.2 Free JVM
5.3 Alternatives
5.4 How to find the current JVM
5.5 How to build the CLASSPATH
5.6 Extensions
5.7 Fonts
5.8 Security policies
5.9 Compilers
5.10 Other tools
6 Java libraries
6.2 Class files
6.3 Manifest
6.4 Java archives: JAR
6.5 Native libraries
7 Applications
7.2 Wrappers
7.3 Run-time dependencies detection
8 Applets and pluggins
9 Web applications
9.2 Web containers
9.2.3 Tomcat
9.3 Users, groups, file permissions
9.4 Web archives: WAR, EAR...
9.5 WEB-INF
9.6 Contexts, virtual hosts and configuration
9.6.3 Apache front-end
9.6.4 webapps-common
9.7 External libraries
9.8 Logs
10 Build scripts and IDE
10.2 Ant
10.3 Eclipse/Netbeans
11 Configuration and external files
11.2 Configuration files
11.2.3 Permissions and ownership
11.3 Encoding of text files
11.4 Language files
12 Documentation
12.2 Manual pages
12.3 Javadoc
12.3.3 doc-base
13 Tests
13.2 Junit
14 Misc
14.2 Databases
14.2.3 db-config-common
14.2.4 JDBC
14.3 Network services
15 Advices to Java packagers
15.2 Package maintainers scripts
15.3 CLASSPATH
15.4 Libraries dependencies
16 Advices to Java developpers
Annexes
Best practices
Best tools for Java development on Debian
Sun java command line options for compatible alternatives
Sun javac command line options for compatible alternatives
Ant common build targets
CLASSPATH creation example
Wrapper with run-time dependencies checks (install vs run-time dependencies
example)
Javadoc creation and doc-base registration
Packaging example for web-app registration with tomcat, jonas, jigsaw,
jetty...
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