Hi, subject change to reflect topic change... Niels Thykier wrote:
Yes, I am guilty here. On a related note, does anyone know if the draft [1] has been ratified or it is just a "proposed" change? If it is the latter then lets get (the parts of) it (we want) approved so I can integrate them.
Nobody is guilty, and thanks for taking my ranting in a constructive manner.I didn't know about this page. How do you want to get comments (should I have some after reading)? Would OpenDoc with tracked changes be OK? I only went very quickly through it, and I got the impression that it's already slightly outdated, e.g. it doesn't seem to take OpenJDK into consideration.
Agreed, but I did put openjdk first, Sun's Java is only 2nd; my understanding from former discussions is that it doesn't disqualify from being in main (or else any software also running on Windows could be disqualified ;-) ).My answer to this is to respect the policy but to put Sun's JRE in front to avoid as much as possible incompatible dependencies.If you put a non-free JVM first in the alternatives your package must go into contrib. It is better to put default-{jre,jdk} or openjdk first and keep the package in main.
I don't think we can call Java private; many Java packages are not (and don't need to be) maintained by the Java Maintainer Group. But that's only my opinion, "privat*" is only used once within the Debian Policy.Speaking of policy, the virtual package lists states: "Packages MUST NOT use virtual package names (except privately, amongst a cooperating group of packages) unless they have been agreed upon and appear in this list." I don't think that the Java packages can be called private but we have java-runtime, java5-runtime, java6-runtime (plus headless variants). Not forgetting java-sdk, java2-compiler, java2-sdk, java5-sdk, java6-sdk. And let us also not forget the gcj/gij stuff, which provides the above inofficial virtual packages without actually being fully compatible with Java.Truly we got quite a few virtual packages not on that list [2] (btw java2-compiler is present on the list). The question is whether this counts as "private amongst a cooperating group of packages". I wonder if it is possible for us to get permissions to create and use virtual packages prefixed javaX- without needing to bother the rest of Debian about it.
Thanks for your effort, it would really be great to have an updated Java Policy in the next Debian,
Eric
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Java/Draft [2] http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/virtual-package-names-list.txt