Help packaging Processing?
System.out.println("Hello, world and debian-java!\n");
I am writing to d-java and those that seem interested in the ITP
bug #433270 [1] for Processing. They've recently made a stable release[2],
and Processing is looking very nice. It also seems to work awesomly
with OpenJDK except for web applets, so I want to get it into Debian.
I have not worked much with Java packages, whether for Debian or
otherwise, but Processing currently distributes a bunch of .jar files
seemingly without source (and hopefully, without GPL violations).
After a brief discussion in d-mentors[3], I understand that this is
common practice for Java packages. They don't have a source tarball
yet, just a tagged svn release[4], which unfortunately is a huge
checkout because you have to download Sun's non-free JRE three times,
once for each of the major OSes in use nowadays. :-(
I have already been in contact with upstream[5] under my nom-de-guerre
"Swap" and we have discussed packaging a little, but I lost interest
and steam somewhere along the way. An Ubuntu package has been done,
but I was unable to get it working here, and I am almost sure it
doesn't come close to respecting Debian policy, although I didn't look
too closely.
There are two big problems I see here:
1) Processing's build system is a messy handwritten shellscript.
2) We have to track down where all those .jar files are coming
from and find their sources.
There's been some interest in getting Processing to build with Ant[6],
although I haven't seen any serious work in this direction. I'm
interested in working on this myself.
So! Who's with me?
Oh, and could a friendly DD set us up in Alioth, please?
Thanks,
- Jordi G. H.
Footnotes:
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/433270
[2] http://processing.org/download/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2008/12/msg00078.html
[4] http://dev.processing.org/source/index.cgi/tags/processing-1.0.1/
[5] http://dev.processing.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=596
[6] http://dev.processing.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=151
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