Re: Reviving the effort to package SBT

[Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>]

Hi Marko,

Thank you very much for offering your help. Packaging SBT would be
really great, Scala 2.12 no longer provides an Ant build and it'll be
complicated to upgrade our package without it. Currently the Debian Java
Team is rather short staffed and more volunteers focusing on the Scala
ecosystem would be a perfect addition.

The dependency of SBT on itself is annoying but isn't the major hurdle
in my opinion. There are two strategies to deal with this:
1. either rewrite the build system using another technology (that's how
Maven was packaged initially, by using an Ant build).
2. or build with a non packaged version of SBT installed manually to get
an initial sbt package, and then rebuild using the package.

The main issue with the SBT packaging is the myriad of dependencies
required. Any packaging effort should start by listing the dependencies
and packaging them one by one.

If you undertake this task we'll be happy to help you by reviewing your
packages, sponsoring them and giving some advices (either on this
mailing list on the #debian-java IRC channel).

Emmanuel Bourg