Hi,
While developing maven based open source tool I decided to have my own launchpad ppa and package all missing dependencies the right Debian way using maven debian helper ( mh_make ). It's was a nice tool to start as I never packaged anything for Debian. But after some time I realized that I spend a lot of time on repackaging dependencies as we change their versions or add new ones.
So I decided to write maven auto packager, with the following ideas in mind:
1. It should take maven repo URL to a given library
2. Find and install existing Debian packaged dependencies
2. Get source jars from maven for all missing dependencies
3. Report missing ones, so user can type locations into some config (svn, git, local dir)
4. Package and install everything in right order using mh_make
As maven is well organized it should work for many libraries, also I thought skipping all testing/doc/reporting phases to reduce the amount of libraries to package.
The main blocker right now is mh_make which is very interactive, but I need it to work in batch mode with ability to predefine answers to its questions.
So the first question, do you think this is a crazy idea?
If not, is there any way automate mh_make or I should use its underlying dependencysolver java class?
Some ideas are already here: https://github.com/cyberb/mh-reactor/blob/master/mh_reactor
Thank you!