Re: Help needed on the Java policy

[Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com>]

Michael Koch wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 08:35:22PM +0100, Eric Lavarde wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm fighting a bit with the current state of the Java policy, and it has  
> > hit pretty hard because FreeMind isn't in testing anymore because of  
> > this (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=436206).
> >
> > OK, starting from the beginning:
> > 1. FreeMind 0.7.1 works only with Sun's Java (let's assume 1.4 only for  
> > the sake of simplicity).
> > 2. i.e. I make my package depend on j2re1.4 | java2-runtime, the first  
> > is necessary, the second is given by the policy.
> > 3. the issue is that anybody can then decide to fulfill the dependency  
> > by installing whatever provides java2-runtime, even if I perfectly know  
> > that it won't work.
> >
> > So, how can I fix this and respect the policy?
> >
> > Additional question: the Java RE packages created with java-package used  
> > to depend on some X libraries, the sun-javaN-jre packages don't anymore.  
> > What is the dependency one should best use for Java programs with an  
> > (X-)Gui?
>
> 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.

I guess it depends on whether the program fails because a particular
runtime has bugs or because the program depends on something it shouldn't
use, such as com.sun.* classes.  We're pretty complete with respect to 1.4,
so I'd like to know what this problem actually is.

Andrew.