F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 01:39:48PM -0500, Aleksandar Kurtakov wrote:
> 
> The thing is this is pointless. If the people that would do most of this
> auditing (Java SIG) do not agree with such scenario the result would be
> that old Require:java will be kept whenever full java jvm is used as this
> keeps compatibility, ease of cooperation with other distros and so on.

In fedora we do our best to figure out what the best course of action is and
then we execute that.  This often involves constructive criticism where
people raise potential issues and then everyone looks for ways to address
those issues.

So if I'm reading this right, what you want to enable is for people to
install the third-party provided jdk and uninstall the Fedora OpenJDK and
then be able to install their Fedora application packages on that
environment.  In order for that to be done without the Fedora OpenJDK being
dragged in, the idea is that the application packages can only Require:
things that are also provided by these third party packages.  The third
party packages already have a virual provide for java and a virtual provide
for java-headless.  They do not have a virtual provide for
java-x11/gui/equivalent.

Is that correct?

Note that in the past, Fedora policy has been that Fedora does not control
what and how third parties package so it's usually not a good idea to write
packages to accomodate things in third party repos if it keeps Fedora from
making better packages.  But with that in mind, there's two angles that we
can work on to show that accomodating third party packages is a good idea in
this case.

Angle 1) more information about the costs of the second virtual provide:
  - Do you have links to the third party jdk packages that are providing
    java-headless and java  and not providing java-x11/gui/etc?  Are we
    talking about a few alternate jdks or many?  or just the most important
    one (The one from Oracle)?  This would help to show how widely the
    virtual provides will affect other packages.
  - Do you have some information about how many people are uninstalling
    Fedora's openjdk package and installing these alternate jdk packages in
    their place?  This would help to show how widely people are actually
    going to be inconvenienced by the difference in virtual provides.

Angle 2) Reduce the benefits of the second virtual provide
  - Propose alternate means of tracking what packages have been audited and
    found to actually need full java.
    - If the target is mainly new maintainers of the package in question,
      then Requiring that Requires: java have a comment in the spec file to
      say that the package really does need the graphical portions of java
      to be installed may be sufficient.
    - If the target is to keep an updated list of what packages are yet to
      be audited, propose something like Virtual Provide in the packages
      that depend on java.  So if you have java-foo that Requires: java and
      you have audited the package to know that the requirement is real, add
      Provides: java-x11-needed to the package.  Then scripts can take the
      set of packages that Require java and do not Provide java-x11-needed
      to generate an up to date list.

-Toshio
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