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Sponsor for a bootstrapping Java++ compiler




Hi,

I am the upstream author of the Nice language, which is an extension of Java with many advanced features. It is released under the GPL. Homepage: http://nice.sourceforge.net

Being a faithful Debian user, I started building and distributing debian packages for the compiler a few month ago. The compiler is now getting stable, and the user base is growing, so I would be glad to see it enter Debian itself. So I have reviewed again the package creation process, reread the different policies (Debian and Java). It seems OK to me, so it would be great to get comments from experienced Debian developers.

I made the package available at: http://nice.sourceforge.net/debian/

I am looking for a sponsor for this package.

A few notes:

The package cannot yet be built entirely with free tools (it needs a JVM at build time to run the bootstrap compiler). It works with kaffe from CVS, but not 1.0.7, so I hope there will be a new release soon. I also made bug reports to sablevm and gcj upstream. So either way, hopefully a free solution will be there soon. Before that, is it possible to build-depend on j2re1.3 | j2re1.4 ? I see that eclipse does that, and is in contrib. Though I wonder how the autobuilder can handle this, since the blackdown packages are not in in the Debian archives at all.

The compiler is partly written in itself, so it needs a working version to build it and bootstrap. I suppose the right way to handle this is to include the necessary jar in the source (I think the ocaml package also does that).

Being both the upstream author and the packager, the debian/ durectory is in the main CVS repository, and I produced a native Debian package, using cvs-buildpackage. Is that OK? (I read an old thread about this, which seemed positive). There could still be packaging-only changes in the future, which would only increase the revision number (omitted for the main releases).

Thanks for your help,

Daniel




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