On Mon Jan 28 10:40, Michael Koch wrote: > Personally I would just depend on some working runtime and on > java(2)-runtime and then forward all bugs specific to some runtime to > the affected runtime. This help to gets the runtimes fixed. Otherwise > they will never get fixed because people dont know the problems. > > In your case just depending on all the SUN JDK variants seems wrong. Do > you know that the IBM variants dont work? How do you know that no > (future) classpath-based runtime will work? What about icedtea? > However, depending on java2-runtime ensures that anyone who already has a free runtime installed, but not sun runtime (I would guess at quite a large proportion of installs), will not get a working program by doing `apt-get install program'. This seems to me to fundamentally the point of the depends system and would seem to not meet policy 3.5: "Every package must specify the dependency information about other packages that are required for the first to work correctly." or 7.2: "The Depends field should be used if the depended-on package is required for the depending package to provide a significant amount of functionality." I would certainly file a serious bug on any package which did not work after running `apt-get install package'. Personally I would as the package maintainer test with any new runtime which was uploaded to the archive and check whether it is supported. While you could say that packages which provide java2-runtime and don't work with programs which run under sun java 1.4 are themselves buggy, it seems to me that since sun java has never been in main, what we are really considering is compatibility with the free `1.4 compliant' VMs. Were we to change to the virtual depends which were suggested elsewhere of free-java and non-free-java, I would be happy depending on non-free-java in this case, but again to be uploaded to contrib, only if it worked with sun-java6 and sun-java5. Otherwise the (imo) invariant that using only the Debian archives satisfying the build-depends results in a working program is broken. I have a package which compiles in the sid java-gcj-compat-dev, but only runs with sun java (or, I assume, IBM, but since IBM isn't in the archive, I don't think it's all that important to cater for). I've filed bugs against gcj, which have been fixed upstream, and it will probably work with icedtea, but until either of those reaches the archive, I only depend on sun-java5 | sun-java6. I wouldn't depend on java2-runtime unless it worked with all of the uploaded ones, or at least the lowest-common-denominator, so that there was a reasonable expectation that it would work for the rest. Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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