What would it take to make Software Collections work in Fedora?

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

Quoting Adam Williamson (2012-12-06 16:06:04)
> On the other hand, we've been proselytizing the Java heretics for over a
> decade now, and the Ruby ones for a while, and neither shows any signs
> of conversion or just plain going away, so we may have to call it an
> ecumenical matter and deal with their models somehow. Sucky as it may
> be. I don't know, I'm a bit conflicted.

Actually, most of current Java ecosystem is sane when Maven is being used. We
can automate Maven into oblivion. We are short time from making Maven packages
be as simple as:
...
%build
%mvn_build

%install
%mvn_install

...

As a bonus, Maven in principle discourages bundling because it's trivial to add
new dependencies properly so that's making stuff easier for us overall.

There are issues with the ecosystem, but they have been mostly caused by
CLASSPATH handling in JVM. This will hopefully go away with new JVMs, but I
won't hold my breath for it (but there is some traction there so who knows).

What I am most afraid of is (in descending order):
 1. Too much focus on backward compat (a lot of upstreams are still trying to
    support JVM 1.4)
 2. Constant reinventing of wheel (tens of XML libraries still being used)
 3. Going backwards - gradle build system which takes worst things from ant,
    and scons and combines them in one ugly package

I am quite optimistic though,

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com