Scala updates and a call for participation

[Will Benton]

Thanks, Mikolaj!

> I think that it would be best to start "unresponsive maintainer"
> procedure in this case (if you haven't already done that).  Pushing big
> updates like this is not appropriate for provenpackagers.  I think that
> most people in Java SIG wouldn't mind if I pushed it, but I would rather
> clear thinks up with the official procedure first.

I did so yesterday:  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1017400

I got an email from Jochen shortly thereafter; hopefully he can pick Scala up again now that it is mostly working.

> I can help with packaging dependencies and/or reviewing them as long as
> they are using Maven.  I will be developing a new Maven packaging
> workflow and I need some stuff to package.  I would rather help you than
> package a bunch of artifacts which I would throw away.
> 
> (I would rather avoid becoming primary maintainer of new packages as I
> already have a enough work with my ~250 packages.)

Excellent!  I think the best way to coordinate is via the wiki and have written up some of the details of packaging Scala and sbt here:

   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/bigdata/packaging/Scala

> I am probably going to work on integrating Ivy with Fedora artifact
> repository (XMvn et al.) in near future and from what I remember sbt is
> using Ivy, so there could be some benefit for sbt too.  I have some
> solutions in mind, but I want to be as transparent as possible and
> discuss all the possibilities.

This would be absolutely great to have API-level support for resolving Fedora artifacts with Ivy (it would enable me to retire some hacks I've used to build sbt).  As far as its impact, there is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem here:  as you may know, when we had Scala in Fedora, we had no Fedora packages depending on it.  This is because, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of big Scala upstreams use sbt to build.  In particular:

* Lift http://liftweb.net/
* Play http://www.playframework.com/
* Spray http://spray.io/
* Spark and Shark http://spark.incubator.apache.org
* Akka http://akka.io
* Slick http://slick.typesafe.com/
* FlockDB https://github.com/twitter/flockdb
* Finagle https://github.com/twitter/finagle
* Kestrel http://robey.github.com/kestrel

So I suspect that, once we had good support for local Ivy resolution in sbt, we'd have a lot of possible Scala packages to include in Fedora, many of which would be interesting to this SIG and to the community in general.



best,
wb