[fedora-java] Introduction and a request for help

[Ruediger Landmann]

Hi all;

I'm part of the Red Hat and Fedora documentation teams, and along the 
way I've picked up maintainership of a few Java packages that are 
important to our publishing process. Unfortunately, one of them is 
causing me some trouble on F15, and I wondered if I could get some more 
eyes on it please?

The package in question is FOP, which we use to generate PDFs. I can 
build the current upstream version (1.0)[1], but it doesn't actually work!

Instead, FOP errors out because it can't find the event-model.xml files 
that it needs. There's a bug open that shows the error message -- 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=689930

Comparing the package built on Koji with the binary available upstream, 
it seems that there should be one of these event model files for most of 
the classes in the .jar, but they're simply not created at build time.

The problem is in our EventProducerCollector, which is patched to use a 
different version of qdox (1.12) from the one that upstream bundles with 
FOP (1.6). Specifically, clazz.getParentClass() is always null and would 
result in a null pointer exception:

/home/rlandmann/rpmbuild/BUILD/fop-1.0/build.xml:374: 
java.lang.NullPointerException
         at 
com.thoughtworks.qdox.model.JavaMethod.getReturnType(JavaMethod.java:464)
         at 
com.thoughtworks.qdox.model.JavaMethodDelegate.getReturnType(JavaMethodDelegate.java:26)
         at 
com.thoughtworks.qdox.model.JavaMethodDelegate.getReturnType(JavaMethodDelegate.java:166)
         at 
org.apache.fop.tools.EventProducerCollector.createMethodModel(EventProducerCollector.java:142)
         at 
org.apache.fop.tools.EventProducerCollector.processEventProducerInterface(EventProducerCollector.java:130)
         at 
org.apache.fop.tools.EventProducerCollector.scanFile(EventProducerCollector.java:99)
         at 
org.apache.fop.tools.EventProducerCollectorTask.processFileSets(EventProducerCollectorTask.java:213)
         at 
org.apache.fop.tools.EventProducerCollectorTask.execute(EventProducerCollectorTask.java:69)
         at 
org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291)
         at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor7.invoke(Unknown Source)
         at 
sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
         at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:616)
         at 
org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:390)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:411)
         at 
org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368)
         at 
org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:809)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.run(Launcher.java:280)
         at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:109)

...except that we have a check at lines 125-127 that just quits if 
clazz.getParentClass() is null.

If anyone has time and inclination to take a look for me, I'd appreciate 
any tips about what to try next. I can't see why getParentClass() isn't 
working on the various EventProducer classes in the source. :(

TIA
Rudi






[1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=246382