Re: How to package Nuxeo DM, a Java EE application, in Debian

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Stefane Fermigier <sf@nuxeo.com> writes:

> I'm talking about the facts that valuable packages are not available *at
> all* for us Debian / Ubuntu users.

In the case being discussed here, they're available from your separate apt
repository.  If you were running Fedora, getting things from third-party
repositories would be de rigueur.

Debian is normally extremely successful at bringing up the level of
package quality and maintainability to meet the requirements for the main
Debian archive and therefore normally doesn't need third-party
repositories that provide more packages with a lower standard of quality.
That's a fine accomplishment, and we should extend that accomplishment
where possible, including in the Java world.  But it's not the end of the
world if a particular language has difficult issues that make fully
populating the main repository with its packages to be hard.

If it's too hard at present to provide security support for or that has
rampant licensing problems, leading major packages for that language to
only be available from third-party repositories, that's not a horrible
outcome.  We'd all like that not to be the case, but it's still fairly
typical and not at all abnormal in the Linux distribution ecosystem.  We
should continue working towards supporting Java in the main archive, but
let's not lose site of the fact that third-party repositories are often a
fine intermediate solution.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>