Re: Notes from the DebConf 17 Java BOF
On 08/08/17 20:50, Tom Marble wrote:
All:
Here are my rough notes from today's BOF.. Please followup with
corrections!
Thanks Tom for taking all these notes yesterday.
5. javadoc
- Our packages that are standards 4.0.1 compliant should support
"nodoc"
- Some users appreciate offline access to docs
I filed [1] a few minutes ago to keep track of a javadoc related issue
in maven-debian-helper which I briefly mentioned. We also discussed to
drop -doc packages completely because we assume a lot of Java developers
will use the ones from Maven Central or other online resources. However
I think a great benefit of Debian doc packages is that they are
integrated in some cases with applications like Netbeans or Robocode and
they "just work". Offline access to documentation might also be a valid
use case. At the moment I add -doc only packages only to, in my opinion,
important packages, and not for simple packages. Not sure if we should
adjust the Java Policy in this regard.
6. Autopkgtest
- We should use this more
- Can include built-in tests
- We can (or autopkgtest already does) use 'ratt' to test reverse deps
ratt is independent from autopkgtest but one way to rebuild
reverse-dependencies. I agree with point 1. We should use it more, at
least for important packages. Perhaps we should find out what packages
would benefit from autopkgtest the most and then add this to our todo
list of things which would be nice to achieve.
7. We discussed keithp's uberjar idea
- We *could* work like the rest of the world and ship uberjars (and
make source packages that include all source for transitive deps)
- We suspect ftp-masters may not be happy about this
- Go ahead plan is to think of even more automation to do what
we already do now.
The issue with uberjars is that we still need to make sure they can be
built from source and as long as this source is not in Debian
ftp-masters will just reject such packages. I believe the general idea
was to explore new ideas of packaging Java applications in general.
Maybe flatpack or other packaging formats may be a way for us to provide
some Java apps at all. That might be not perfect but better than nothing.
Currently on my todo list for Buster:
1. Improving the documentation about Java packaging. I already wrote one
article, more will hopefully follow soon and at some point I move them
to the Debian Wiki, so that everyone can modify and improve them. The
whole Java wiki stuff needs a major update I guess.
2. Getting the Maven build system fixed which affects our work flow in
general
3. OpenJDK 9: Getting Java 9 into Buster. We should just start filing
bug reports with severity: normal now and raise the severity accordingly
in the future. I wonder whether Chris West would be interested in this
task because he has already done some amazing work in analyzing the key
issues for this transition?
4. Fixing bugs as they appear and updating packages as usual. I guess I
take a look at Eclipse again in the near future.
Markus
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=871669
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