Bug#639910: giving up to package sbt for debian
Control: retitle -1 RFP: simple-build-tool -- for scala and java projects
I've sent the following explanation to the sbt list and copy it here:
back in february I said that I can't work on packaging sbt for Debian due to
my bachelor thesis. This is over now and I took another look at sbt. I decided
that I won't have time to package it and that it might not worth the effort
anymore.
Packaging sbt for Debian has (still) two major issues:
a) Sbt needs itself to be built. But in Debian we try to minimize packages
with circular build dependencies. I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to
extract a minimal sbt that could be build with a simple makefile of shell
script, but this effort would only make sense if upstream would officially
support this.
b) Sbt must be buildable without accessing the net. I found it hard to really
convince sbt to work offline.
I'd have liked to practice Scala by contributing to Sbt, but the total lack of
developer documentation and code comments discouraged me.
Scala has some nice properties that would have made it a nice language for
education. But for several reasons I will only install software on my school
computers that is available from the debian archive.
On the other hand a combination of D and Python might even be better for
school.
I don't know what the priorities of Sbt development are right now. My wishlist
would be:
- Extract code from sbt into independent, smaller projects where it makes
sense.
- Provide developer documentation in the form of inline comments, package
descriptions and external documents if necessary.
Please CC me in replies since I'll unsubscribe this list in a few days.
Best regards,
Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro
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