Dongjin Lee
A hitchhiker in the mathematical world.
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Hello Dongjin,
On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 06:45:43PM +0900, Dongjin Lee wrote:
> Hello Debian Java community,
>
> It seems like there was a discussion about providing GraalVM community
> edition (aka GraalVM CE) Debian package years ago, but it is still not
> offered yet:
>
> https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-java@lists.debian.org/msg23951.html
>
> I have built and maintained GraalVM CE's Debian package (link below) and
> hope to contribute to the community. Could anyone help me? I am a total
> layman to Debian package maintenance.
>
> https://github.com/dongjinleekr/graalvm-ce-deb
>
> All kinds of feedbacks and advice are greatly appreciated.
I took a look at the repo, which takes prebuilt binaries and creates a
.deb from them. This sort of binary-only package is not suitable for
Debian "main" - the package would need to build the Graal CE compiler
from its sources [1] in order to comply with the DFSG (Debian Free
Software Guidelines). Furthermore, and this can be the difficult part,
all components in the tool chain used to compile that package must also
be packaged for Debian and build from source within Debian. There are
occasionally exceptions made for bootstapping, but that's a different
topic.
Sometimes software is packaged and is available via non-free [2], but it
is not part of Debian. Is that what you are asking about? In this
case, given that Graal is GPLv2 with the CPE, it feels like we should be
building it from source.
If you are interested, here is a link to the DFSG and an excellent FAQ
about [3,4].
Cheers,
tony
[1] https://github.com/oracle/graal
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive#s-non-free
[3] https://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines
[4] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html