Re: Developing with Java on Debian

["Richard Cole" <richard.j.cole@gmail.com>]

To better understand debian packaging java libraries I used javahelper
to package joda-time which is a pretty nice date-time library for
java.

I've put my effort at:

deb      http://debian.richcole.org.s3.amazonaws.com unstable/
deb-src  http://debian.richcole.org.s3.amazonaws.com unstable/

You can't get a directory listing there, so here's the contents:

2$ s3cmd ls s3://debian.richcole.org/
Bucket 'debian.richcole.org':
2008-06-30 05:35       570   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Packages
2008-06-30 05:35       434   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Packages.bz2
2008-06-30 05:35       422   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Packages.gz
2008-06-30 05:35      1523   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Release
2008-06-30 05:35       529   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Sources
2008-06-30 05:35       412   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Sources.bz2
2008-06-30 05:35       392   s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/Sources.gz
2008-06-30 05:35      1592
s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/joda-time_1.5.2-1.diff.gz
2008-06-30 05:35       685
s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/joda-time_1.5.2-1.dsc
2008-06-30 05:35      1017
s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/joda-time_1.5.2-1_i386.changes
2008-06-30 05:35   1270854
s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/joda-time_1.5.2.orig.tar.gz
2008-06-30 05:35   1434758
s3://debian.richcole.org/unstable/libjoda-time-java_1.5.2-1_all.deb


I'd be pleased if you (the collective of debian java packagers) would
look over what I've done and provide comments, hints and suggestions.

One problem that I haven't solved so far is how to get the classpath
into the MANIFEST file as was proposed earlier in this thread.

I presume that the standard java class loader honours the classpath in
the MANIFEST. Is that right? Should javahelper be adding junit.jar to
the classpath.

I choose not to use the ant-script that came with Joda-time but
instead used the java-helper primitives.One issue I encountered was
that joda-time generates timezone files as part of the build process
using itself and then includes those in the jar. You'll see that I
call jh_build twice, one to build the jar, then again to package the
jar after adding the generated timezone files.

At this stage I just tested with gcj.

>> by which you presumably mean sun-java6-jdk, if you haven't noticed that it's now in non-free
>
> sun-j2sdk1.6 is the package generated by java-package. If you want to
> really epend on a propriatory JDK please use sun-java6-jdk instead.

Ah, I hadn't noticed that it was in non-free now. I presume this means
I can get rid of java-package and the packages it produced and swap to
the sun-java6-jdk.

regards,

Richard.