Re: Frustration with trying to build Debian packages from Maven-based sources
* Emmanuel Bourg:
> My reasoning is the following:
> - The binary package must be built from the source
> - This is currently done with a fairly sophisticated make file
True for CDBS, with the main problem there being that CDBS is neither
appropriately documented nor particularly debuggable.
IMO things are not so bad for Debhelper 7+.
> - We are free to use the build tools we want (is that correct?)
> - So Maven or Ant could be used instead
I am too lazy to look it up in the policy right now... but I believe
that debian/rules has to be a Makefile and support certain defined
goals.
> - Java developers let jdeb build their packages (with Ant or Maven)
>
> Would that work? You still have a proper source package, but the hard
> work is delegated to Maven/Ant.
How is the changelog and the copyright file generated?
> Most of the information used by jdeb is actually pulled from the POM, so
> that doesn't help much.
How is the version number for the .deb generated?
> But the maintainer scripts and the configuration files could be
> reused.
Yes!
> In my opinion the main "selling point" of jdeb is to let Java developers
> take care of the packaging of their own applications or libraries with a
> tool close to their current tool chain (Maven or Ant).
Yeah. Debian developers are probably not really part of the target
audience.
> They don't have to learn all the subtleties of the Debian packaging
> tools. That's an opportunity to distribute the load of packaging Java
> softwares for Debian over a broad range of developers instead of
> relying on a small set of experts.
Frankly, I see most of the opportunity in improvements of mh_make and
mh_* tools. If mh_make can be made to leverage some of the work that has
gone into jdeb, that would be great.
At the moment I think that the maven-debian-helper documentation has the
most room for improvements. I am even willing to try writing some, but I
need help from somebody who knows the tools.
Cheers,
-Hilko
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