Getting my feet wet with Java and Debian

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Hi.

Having packaged a lot of things on Debian, I would like to start packaging
some Java-related packages and, from what I see, the Java ecosystem (and
other JVM related languages, like Clojure and Scala) is considerably
different from that of C/C++, starting with the tools and the way that they
manage dependencies.

In particular, I see that maven is the tool of choice for many projects in
Java and that it pulls dependencies from the network, which is a no-no for
the buildds.  And it seems that Debian has its own layer of tools on top of
these already existing tools to circumvent pulling stuff from the network.
I intend to try to collaborate on some low-hanging fruit on

    https://commons.apache.org/sandbox/commons-graph/

and, perhaps, package it for Debian (among other tools). Ideally, I would
like to have a recent Scala in Debian, but that seems to be a lot of work.
As end-user applications, having netlogo (which depens on Scala) and gephi
would be super nice.

I will probably make a lot of stupid mistakes even starting small (say, with
commons-graph) and I would appreciate some assistance here.

If everything works OK, I plan on participating of DebCamp (and DebConf) and
I would be willing to be mentored there to get my hands dirty with some of
this stuff.

My questions then are:

* Is there anybody here that is going to DebCamp this year?
* Would you be willing to answer some stupid questions and teach me the
  basics so that I can work on theses packages (and, possibly, other
  dependencies), as long as it helps the packaging of Java for Debian?


Thanks in advance,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br