On 03/13/2013 12:39 PM, Stefan Denker wrote: > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 10:40:41AM -0700, tony mancill wrote: >> I certainly share your concern that there aren't more active maintainers >> for openjdk in Debian. I have the same concern for the other packages >> maintained by the Java Team. It would be great to have (at least) 20 >> additional active DDs and DMs focused on the numerous challenges related >> to Java in Debian. > > This is probably where I should stand up... > > I am this guy here: > http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=Stefan%2BDebian%40dn-kr.de > and I have been lurking here for quite a while. > > Which "numerous challenges" are there concerning java in debian? I am > trying to gather some time every week for packaging software for Debian. > I might be able to help a bit. Hello Stefan, Thank you for continuing the thread in this manner. I feel like I'm fairly new to the team, having mostly I lurked on the list for a while myself, so I won't claim that the following is either representative or complete. But in IMO, in some rough semblance of level of commitment: 1) openjdk developers, both to provide support for security updates to openjdk-6 for wheezy and to work on openjdk-7 and beyond. I think Matthias' frustration here is well-warranted, as he is shouldering the entire load (and has for a *long* time). 2) Java packing tool-chain developers, like the work that Thomas Koch is currently doing on the maven helpers, and Ludovic Claude and others before him. Work in this area will help make packaging go more quickly and be more accessible to more developers. For example, Steve Langasek provided a patch over a year ago to provide better support for debhelper [1], but there either isn't enough developer "bandwidth" or interest to assimilate these contributions. 3) More developers concerned with policy. For example Rene's recent post is 100% correct - the current Java policy doesn't require Maven artifacts. However, I believe that is at least partly because maven wasn't as prevalent when the current policy was adopted. It's quite useful for Java libraries to provide this metadata when other software being packaged does use maven to manage its dependencies, and so it may be worth discussing. 4) Packagers, sponsors/mentors. There are a fair number of folks contributing packages, but it still feels like the team is spread too thin. There are maybe 700 or so team-managed packages, and we don't seem to be nearly as efficient as the Perl team or others at managing large numbers of packages per developer. And many of those packages are outdated. Some of this is related to (2) and (3). Also, and this is an unsubstantiated guess, but I'd say that there are probably 2-3x more Java packages needed to make the Debian the distribution of choice for developing in Java. There were recent posts (last year) about getting dogtag and RESTEasy into Debian, and I believe that both of them were going to require another 40-50 additional packages. 5) More users/packagers/developers. Within the packages we do have, we have some non-trivial issues. One example is the fact that tomcat6 and tomcat7 conflict with each other and so can't be installed side-by-side. In general, I think we need to do more testing and practice better general build hygiene - e.g. building (and testing!) reverse dependencies before introducing updated libraries to the archive. 6) Active, participating users (as I write this, I want to move it back up to position 1 or 2, so ignore any implied priority with the numbers). The more people there are using the packages, contributing bugs, and patches, the better and more cohesive it will be. Anyway, I realize that this is a long post and don't want to try any more of the collective patience of those reading the list. In short, the team would benefit from most any interaction that is helpful to FLOSS in general - it just feels like the Debian Java team could use a lot of it. If you're still reading and would like to help, find a package [2] or a bug [3] that needs some attention and provide a patch, or post back to list or via private email if you prefer with other ideas about how you'd like to participate. Thanks for reading, tony [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-java-maintainers/2012-January/036726.html [2] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org [3] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-java-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
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