F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java

[Reindl Harald]

Am 19.11.2013 20:29, schrieb Toshio Kuratomi:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 01:29:58PM -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> On 11/19/2013 11:23 AM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>>> what about having a "java-1.7.0-openjdk" meta-package obsoleting
>>> the existing one and pulling *both* but decide if Fedora packages
>>> if the headless is enough for dependencies and so packagers of
>>> sevrer software can require this?
>>>
>>> this way you would have the least surprise for someone who does not
>>> care about the difference and expects the full one by install
>>> "java-1.7.0-openjdk" but make it really easy to uninstall any
>>> graphical dependencies on servers
>>>
>> I agree with Reindl here, if I understand him correctly. It would
>> certainly break upgrades in an unexpected way if an upgrade from
>> "java-1.7.0-openjdk" suddenly stopped carrying the graphical components.
> 
> Note -- I think that the way the feature has things constructed would
> achieve something similar.  The java package is essentially java-x11.  It
> would Require: java-headless.
> 
> So yum install java will get you the java w/X11 support.
> 
>> I think it would be wise to do the same for Java. Create
>> 'java-openjdk-1.7.0-headless' and 'java-openjdk-1.7.0--x11' and then
>> have the 'java-openjdk-1.7.0' metapackage install both of them.
>>
> I can see one advantage to this approach: it lets us tell packagers that
> Requires: java should no longer be used.  Packagers should determine whether
> they're using APIs that require X and either Requires: java-x11 or Requires:
> java-headless based on what they really need.  We can then audit the
> packageset at a later date to determine which packages haven't adjusted
> their Requirements yet

agreed, but with the meta-package nobody is forced to change anything
while any maintainer at any time can say "hey, we do not need the
graphical components and so we relax now the dependencies"

so anybody can point at any time to whatever package and ask for
relax the deps to java-headless and at no point in time any change
is forced since the expierience shows changes can't be forced inside
Fedora - look how long it took to get native systemd-units and there
are still packages with sysv-init-scripts

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