Re: How to package Nuxeo DM, a Java EE application, in Debian
tony mancill <tmancill@debian.org> writes:
> What I hope to see happen is that Debian will continue to package more
> and more of the popular Java libraries needed for these applications and
> frameworks, to the point where Debian becomes a development platform of
> choice because (a) it's less work to apt-get everything than it is to
> find and pull JARs manually,
The hard sell here is that Maven is essentially apt-get for Java
developers, and Maven hosts a central repository that just about everyone
uses, very similar to Debian's archive except for Java JARs. So the
normal selling points for Debian packaging of the libraries, while still
very much there for administrators doing deployment and concerned about
security updates, isn't really there for developers.
Maven has other issues, mind, and I still agree with Debian's direction,
but I can understand why people who are largely living in the Java world
aren't happy with it. And I admit that right now for the internal
Stanford project that started off my interest in this we're just making
quick and dirty packages of WAR files or shaded JARs built with Maven
rather than doing it right. But I'm hoping to go back and clean that up
later.
I think one key is going to be to make it really, *really* easy to package
a JAR file, so that the number of packages required are less intimidating.
The major issues that I think we'll run into is that a lot of Java
development has a very iffy notion of source availability and licensing,
and Maven's very tight and specific versioning support means that people
are not as careful about ABI compatibility as they really should be.
It's going to be a hard problem.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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