JPackage and Fedora

[Bryan Kearney]

Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> Background:  I asked Matt to bring this discussion here, and in the
> meantime I'm getting a better understanding of the current relationship
> between JPackage and Fedora.
> 
> On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 10:24 -0700, Matthew Dahlman wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've got a question about JPackage. Before getting to the question I'll
>> give a bit of background. JasperServer, like most Java apps running in an
>> application server, does not directly ship the source for many of our .jar
>> dependencies; we retrieve them from trusted maven repositories. Anyone
>> that's interested can track down the source to any of the jar files, but
>> we don't normally ship it. This may not be in keeping with Fedora's
>> guidelines.
> 
> You are correct, all dependencies must be inside of Fedora.  Which
> sort-of answers your question below.  Sort of.
> 
>> Therefore it would be good if we had a standard way to distribute the
>> various jars along with their source. That brings us to JPackage (JPP).
>> According to their site (http://www.jpackage.org/aboutjpp.php):
>> The JPackage Project has two primary goals:
>> - To provide a coherent set of Java software packages for Linux,
>> satisfying all quality requirements of other applications. 
>> - To establish an efficient and robust policy for Java software packaging
>> and installation.
> 
> In fact, many JPackage packages are used as the ~70% starting point for
> the package that is submitted to Fedora.
> 
>> I also noticed that Fedora includes jpackage-utils by default. This brings
>> me, finally, to my question. Is JPackage the correct place to direct our
>> efforts to get all of our jar dependencies included?
> 
> At this time, I do not think it is the right direction.  This is because
> there is not a formal relationship to operate between the two
> repositories.  I'll keep hammering on that situation.
> 
> The end goal for all of us is "yum install foo" pulls in foo and all
> foo's dependencies.  If those dependencies are in JPackage, that install
> won't work.  Right now.
> 
> One thing we'll do here in this SIG is understand why things are how
> they are, and see what recommendations/changes we want to rally for in
> Fedora ... and JPackage.
> 
>> I'm hoping for answers somewhere along this continuum:
>>
>> "Yes, JPackage is the one and only place for work like this. Fedora
>> officially supports this project and recommends that all Java apps use
>> it."
>> or
>> "Yes, JPackage is a reasonable place for this work. There are some details
>> to work out because they do a few things differently from Fedora best
>> practices. Alternatively you could use X or Y."
>> or
>> "No, those JPackage guys will be the death of Java as we know it. Maybe of
>> death of Linux and of life as we know it as well."
> 
> "No, the relationship with JPackage is too much in flux to guarantee
> that won't be wasted work.  Do the work in Fedora, and if JPackage
> becomes the standard, it will be easy to port the package over there."

Karsten, is there an alien type jpp -> rpm converter?

-- bk