Java and Rawhide?

[Dax Kelson]

I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.

I'm curious what's up.

Dax

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 12:59 -0600, Dax Kelson wrote:
> I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
>
> I'm curious what's up.

All I can say is YAY!

-sv

[Daniel Roesen]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:59:38PM -0600, Dax Kelson wrote:
> I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
>
> I'm curious what's up.

This was probably a community decision of the community project Fedora.
:-P

SCNR.
Daniel

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 28 septembre 2004 à 21:01 +0200, Daniel Roesen a écrit :
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:59:38PM -0600, Dax Kelson wrote:
> > I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
> >
> > I'm curious what's up.
>
> This was probably a community decision of the community project Fedora.
> :-P

Redhat decided to join the JPackage boat;). The rawhide java system is
in a lot of flux now to get jpp and rawhide in sync. Some packages
didn't have the same name in both repositories for example, and I
suppose the rh people are removing them from rawhide before putting them
back with the names used in jpp deps.

Things are a bit more hidden on the jpp side because not too many people
track the devel section, but I can tell you it's moving a lot right now
too.

I must say it's very nice to have RedHat work with the community, and in
the short time they've worked with the JPackage project they contributed
a lot of stuff back.

Regards,

[Elliot Lee]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Dax Kelson wrote:
> I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.

Apparently, they don't work at this point and the maintainer wanted them
pulled until after FC3 when he has a chance to do things right.

Questions, comments, offers of help to [e-mail] :-)
-- Elliot
We're so busy putting out fires that we don't take time to stop kids from
playing with matches.

[Gary Benson]

Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Dax Kelson wrote:
> > I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
>
> Apparently, they don't work at this point and the maintainer wanted
> them pulled until after FC3 when he has a chance to do things right.
>
> Questions, comments, offers of help to [e-mail] :-)

Yeah, the packages that were in FC3 were mostly remnants of the
RHUGish stuff that was in FC2.  For FC3 I was replacing them with the
JPackage.org stack (with native code libraries for gij) but it's
taking forever to get it right.  The old packages didn't work any
more, and they get in the way if you're trying to install JPackage so
I got them removed for now.

Cheers,
Gary

[Warren Togami]

Gary Benson wrote:
> Elliot Lee wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Dax Kelson wrote:
> > > I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
> >
> > Apparently, they don't work at this point and the maintainer wanted
> > them pulled until after FC3 when he has a chance to do things right.
> >
> > Questions, comments, offers of help to [e-mail] :-)
>
> Yeah, the packages that were in FC3 were mostly remnants of the
> RHUGish stuff that was in FC2.  For FC3 I was replacing them with the
> JPackage.org stack (with native code libraries for gij) but it's
> taking forever to get it right.  The old packages didn't work any
> more, and they get in the way if you're trying to install JPackage so
> I got them removed for now.

Should be no problem to push your fixed java packages to Extras, which 
can happen anytime even after the release of FC3.

Warren

[Paul Nasrat]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 00:01 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> Gary Benson wrote:
> > Elliot Lee wrote:
> > > On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Dax Kelson wrote:
> > > > I see that lots of Java related packages got removed from rawhide.
> > >
> > > Apparently, they don't work at this point and the maintainer wanted
> > > them pulled until after FC3 when he has a chance to do things right.
> > >
> > > Questions, comments, offers of help to [e-mail] :-)
> >
> > Yeah, the packages that were in FC3 were mostly remnants of the
> > RHUGish stuff that was in FC2.  For FC3 I was replacing them with the
> > JPackage.org stack (with native code libraries for gij) but it's
> > taking forever to get it right.  The old packages didn't work any
> > more, and they get in the way if you're trying to install JPackage so
> > I got them removed for now.
>
> Should be no problem to push your fixed java packages to Extras, which 
> can happen anytime even after the release of FC3.

JPackage is already the upstream - so pushing there makes more sense
than Extras IMHO.

The hope is we can support both free (including native) and proprietary
JDKs.

Paul

[Hans de Goede]

I for one would like to be able too:
-build and run java code, wether this is done native or on a vm is
  equal to me. The environment should be able to handle jni
  (specificly, it should be able to compile and run rxtx for serial port
  access)
-use java applets from a webbrowser more specificly from mozilla.

Since this currently isn't possible I would like to be able to easily:
a) install SUN's official JDK and
b) gcj and
c) sablevm and
-easily switch between a,b and c for compiling and running and
-be able to use jdk-plugin in mozilla and sablevm or jdk in konqueror.

I know a lott is happening and I would like to try things out, report 
bugs and maybe even contribute. But how? where is the documentation. I 
think we need a java on Fedora webpage like the stateless pages which 
gives pointers to download some packages which are so beta that they are 
not in rawhide and which contains a quickstart guide.

Also are there any sablevm rpm's anywhere? If not why not? I think 
someone should take a good look at the freejava package from debian, 
this also contains some free tools needed to generate the headers for 
jni compilation.

Regards,

Hans

[Nicolas Mailhot]

If you are willing to help solve this problem (which is an hairy one and
has been draining several people's efforts for several years) I can only
invite you to go on the JPackage site (http://www.jpackage.org/), look
at the packages, the documentation, the list archives and help the
project.

Since it *will* be the upstream for future FC/RHEL java subsistems and
it is an open community project (similar to Fedora, with some twists
like also targeting Mandrake/Novell and accepting we still need to work
with sun binaries in some cases) you *can* make a difference.

The short-term result will be a gcj/proprietary jvm stack released a bit
after FC3 (I think we're too late for FC3 proper) and before RHEL4.
sabletron support is not included at this point and is probably material
for the next jpp released. It involves solving different problems that
are detailed on the http://java.debian.net/index.php/CommonJavaPackaging
site (to be fair while Debian is more advanced than JPP on free VM
problems I feel we are closer to what's needed in production now).

Note that everyone would love a totally free stack (which was one goal
of the FC2 java system) but it seems given the low number of people
willing to work on it now we still need to go through an intermediate
phase where proprietary and free stacks coexist (with the proprietary
parts being phased out once the free ones are ready). There is still a
lot of work to do - even with Mandrake, Suse and Fedora/Redhat users and
lately RedHat direct involvement the project is not going as fast as
everyone would wish it to. But it certainly has come a long way from the
3-4 person team it was a few years back.

Regards,

[Hans de Goede]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> If you are willing to help solve this problem (which is an hairy one and
> has been draining several people's efforts for several years) I can only
> invite you to go on the JPackage site (http://www.jpackage.org/), look
> at the packages, the documentation, the list archives and help the
> project.
>
> Since it *will* be the upstream for future FC/RHEL java subsistems and
> it is an open community project (similar to Fedora, with some twists
> like also targeting Mandrake/Novell and accepting we still need to work
> with sun binaries in some cases) you *can* make a difference.
>
> The short-term result will be a gcj/proprietary jvm stack released a bit
> after FC3 (I think we're too late for FC3 proper) and before RHEL4.
> sabletron support is not included at this point and is probably material
> for the next jpp released. It involves solving different problems that
> are detailed on the http://java.debian.net/index.php/CommonJavaPackaging
> site (to be fair while Debian is more advanced than JPP on free VM
> problems I feel we are closer to what's needed in production now).
>
> Note that everyone would love a totally free stack (which was one goal
> of the FC2 java system) but it seems given the low number of people
> willing to work on it now we still need to go through an intermediate
> phase where proprietary and free stacks coexist (with the proprietary
> parts being phased out once the free ones are ready). There is still a
> lot of work to do - even with Mandrake, Suse and Fedora/Redhat users and
> lately RedHat direct involvement the project is not going as fast as
> everyone would wish it to. But it certainly has come a long way from the
> 3-4 person team it was a few years back.
>
> Regards,

I've looked at jpackage.org and have 2 problems:
-to much focus on propietary solutions
-non existant documentation

Regards,

Hans

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le jeudi 30 septembre 2004 à 13:10 +0200, Hans de Goede a écrit :
> I've looked at jpackage.org and have 2 problems:
> -too much focus on propietary solutions

It wouldn't have been proposed as FC3 java system if most of it couldn't
work with free stacks. Now a lot of people use it in production today,
and frankly the free bits are not always mature enough to fill their
needs alone (but this is slowly changing).
> -non existant documentation

And I'll object the no doc bits since I've written a large part of the
current doc myself. More accurately the web site is a mess, everyone
knows it but no one stepped up to redesign it yet.

Anyway, you can change it if you contribute doc of freevm bits;). I
don't think Redhat, Suse and Mandrake would have all joined the boat if
there was a better alternative in the rpm world now.

JPP is certainly not up to Fedora.us standards right now, but again the
number of contributors is several orders smaller than Fedora's, and
packaging java stuff is often *much* harder, since a large part of the
Java developer community is totally unaware of FOSS release conventions.

Cheers,

[Hans de Goede]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> And I'll object the no doc bits since I've written a large part of the
> current doc myself. More accurately the web site is a mess, everyone
> knows it but no one stepped up to redesign it yet.

Maybe the website mess is the reason why I've gotten the impression 
there are (almost) no docs, where do I find your docs?

Regards,

Hans

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le jeudi 30 septembre 2004 à 16:15 +0200, Hans de Goede a écrit :
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > And I'll object the no doc bits since I've written a large part of the
> > current doc myself. More accurately the web site is a mess, everyone
> > knows it but no one stepped up to redesign it yet.
>
> Maybe the website mess is the reason why I've gotten the impression 
> there are (almost) no docs, where do I find your docs?

The core doc is in the %doc section of the jpackage-utils rpm. It
describes the specific scripts we use, and some policy rules (jpp 1.5
policy doc). For most other questions the large set of spec files
exposed via cvsweb is the reference.

Cheers,

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 15:25, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> JPP is certainly not up to Fedora.us standards right now, but again the
> number of contributors is several orders smaller than Fedora's, and
> packaging java stuff is often *much* harder, since a large part of the
> Java developer community is totally unaware of FOSS release conventions.

One more data point in addition to the above: JPackage's
distro-independence goal results in another layer of complexity and
tradeoffs, making it impossible to adhere to the strictest
distro-specific packaging "rules".  But it works pretty well anyway.

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 04:55, Hans de Goede wrote:
> I for one would like to be able too:
> -build and run java code, wether this is done native or on a vm is
>   equal to me. The environment should be able to handle jni
>   (specificly, it should be able to compile and run rxtx for serial port
>   access)
> -use java applets from a webbrowser more specificly from mozilla.
>
> Since this currently isn't possible I would like to be able to easily:
> a) install SUN's official JDK and
> b) gcj and

Switching between a and b using alternatives should be easy in FC3 if
you install java-1.4.2-gcj-compat (in FC3) and java-1.4.2-sun-compat
(from jpackage.org).
> c) sablevm and
> -easily switch between a,b and c for compiling and running and
> -be able to use jdk-plugin in mozilla and sablevm or jdk in konqueror.
>
> I know a lott is happening and I would like to try things out, report 
> bugs and maybe even contribute. But how? where is the documentation. I 
> think we need a java on Fedora webpage like the stateless pages which 
> gives pointers to download some packages which are so beta that they are 
> not in rawhide and which contains a quickstart guide.

http://www.jpackage.org/rpm.php?id=2880

and

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fed...
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fed...

I've written a quick-start guide about using alternatives for jpackage'd
SDKs:

http://people.redhat.com/fitzsim/jpackage-alternatives-quickstart-guide.txt

Tom