Re: plans for eclipse luna in debian
Hi Emmanuel,
On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 12:39 AM, Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org> wrote:
> Le 10/11/2015 23:27, Mikołaj Izdebski a écrit :
>
>> For the past 4 years I've been working on improving and automating
>> Java packaging techniques in Fedora/RHEL. Seeing Debian trying to do
>> the same now (esp. recent implementation of Gradle helper and attempt
>> to package Tycho) I feel obligated to help you, at least by pointing
>> and explaining existing solutions in Fedora, sharing other experience
>> or even doing Debian packaging work.
>
> I'd like to sincerely thank you for your help. I haven't been able to
> reuse your code for the Gradle helper, but I don't think I would have
> been able to do it as easily without reading the XMvn code.
I'm glad to hear that. And idea sharing goes both ways - your work on
Gradle helper gave me some ideas how Gradle integration in XMvn could
be improved and motivated me to finish it.
>> 4. XMvn. I would like to suggest trying using XMvn project in Debian.
>> It has been designed specifically to automate packaging Java software
>> for GNU/Linux distributions. XMvn strives to be distribution-agnostic
>> (all Fedora- and RPM-specific code are in separate project --
>> javapackages [7]). XMvn has full support for Apache Maven, Gradle,
>> Eclipse Tycho and Apache Ivy, plus partial support for Aether Ant Tasks
>> and SBT (through Ivy). If there is any interest in seeing XMvn used
>> in Debian then I'm willing to package it, maintain it and implement
>> any upstream code necessary to support Debian use cases.
>
> It would be really great if we were able to join our forces around a
> common set of tools. maven-debian-helper serves us well but I don't feel
> married to it.
>
> I haven't figured out yet how to use XMvn in a Debian context, but I
> definitely keep an eye on it. The main hurdle I think is how to manage a
> mixed environment with /usr/share/maven-repo populated by
> maven-debian-helper and the XMvn repository. If the tools can't
> interoperate we would have to plan a transition and that would take a
> lot of time and effort.
I think that XMvn should be extended to be able to produce and consume
native Debian repository format (basically standard Maven repo
format). This way packages built with XMvn and maven-debian-helper
could be mixed freely. No migration plan would be needed - package
maintainers could use either tool according to their preference.
What looks more difficult from my PoV is proper integration with dpkg
and debhelper/CDBS. Of course XMvn could be used directly from
standard rules file, but the goal is to avoid manual work and
boilerplate code whenever possible.
> Since I can't undertake that for now I'm just doing small incremental
> improvements like gradle-debian-helper. My next goal is the transition
> of maven-debian-helper to Maven 3, your trick to override/inject code
> into Maven solves an issue we had with the dependency resolution due to
> the lack of maven-metadata.xml files in the Debian repository.
>
> So even if we aren't able to share code yet we are at least sharing
> ideas and that's very valuable.
I hope that sharing code will be possible in some future too -- I will
try working on this as time allows. My initial plan is to enhance
XMvn to be able to read/write Debian-like repo under
/usr/share/maven-repo, then package it for Debian, implement required
dpkg-specific code and create some PoC integration with debhelper 9.
--
Mikołaj
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