Re: Report from the Debian Java developers meeting at FOSDEM
Hi all,
Stefan Gybas wrote:
Arnaud and Dalibor gave a talk about packaging Java software which
covered JPackage (http://www.jpackage.org/), Gentoo, FreeBSD and of
course Debian. One goal of this talk was to improve collaboration
between these projects and Red Hat's effort to package Java software
which is compiled to native code using gcj (http://gcc.gnu.org/java/).
I talked to Gentoo-java developers on IRC later, and had the feeling
they were quite interested in more collaboration. Maybe we can catch up
for the RMLL this year and start devising plans to take over the world :)
larger applications work. So the Wiki page at
http://java.debian.net/index.php/MovingJavaToMain which was started by
Arnaud is also useful to them. In the future, the Debian Java
maintainers will try even harder to make their packages work with free
JVMs and send their results to them.
I've discussed that with Jim, and I think I'll start adding the
instructions how to run applications with Kaffe to that wiki, to make
the life of our packagers a little easier.
Main discussions with Java developers
Besides the issue of better collaboration we also had a lot of technical
discussions:
- The proposed new Debian Java Policy by Jan Schulz
That's got time till the next debian release is out, I guess.
There were also a lot of other discussions which are more or less
relevant for Debian. For example, Chris Halls and Rene Engelhard talked
to Dalibor about ways to build the Debian Openoffice.org packages with
Java support.
Hey, we've actually got a mailing list now ;) And I've made some
commitments to clean up some code to start things off.
Next steps
We'll try to get more Java packages from contrib to main. gjdoc will be
a major step for this since this would allow us to build Javadoc API
documenation for library packages in main. We will also try to set up
some testing environments for building Java packages with Kaffe and
SableVM so we don't have to manually try each new upstream version.
Yeah!
We also need to get/keep the free JVMs working on all architectures so
they move to testing. This is the part where we currently need most help
so if porters have a couple of minutes (or should I say hours?) please
help us. Just send a mail to the debian-java mailing list.
For kaffe, I'd say hours. I'd start with cleaning up all the compiler
warnings shown in the buildd logs, though. Volunteers are invited to
come to #kaffe on irc.freenode.org if they want to lend a hand to kaffe.
But you might as well help out Grzegorz on SableVM, which seems to be
much less work to port and fix. I believe that SableVM could always use
another good developer and tester, as well, just like gcj/gij and other
GNU Classpath based free runtimes would welcome new users and
developers. Feel free to join in, if you're interested. We're all a
noisy bunch, ocassionally slapping each other silly with licensing
questions, but pulling free java in the same direction[1] nevertheless.
cheers,
dalibor topic
[1] Ahead, of course.
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