Changes in Java packaging guidelines - RFC

[Ville Skyttä]

On Wednesday 03 November 2010, Stanislav Ochotnicky wrote:

> FYI the versionless jar/javadocs files are now in the draft (thanks for
> the suggestion, somehow none of us thought of that)

Thanks for considering it.

> But keep those comments coming, we'll try to keep working on the
> guidelines to reflect current needs of packagers.

Some other things off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1) I'd like to see crosslinking of javadocs at least a SHOULD, and I wouldn't 
mind a MUST at all.  I'm also leaning towards making it a MUST for javadoc 
packages that crosslink with other javadoc packages require the ones they 
crosslink with.

2) Regarding wrapper scripts, I'd like to point out the %jpackage_script macro 
for creating them.  Here's one example of it in action:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=457277
Also, most invocations of it will want to set the last argument of it to true 
(such as in the example above) to make jpackage-utils stuff prefer a JRE over 
a full Java SDK (assuming of course that they work with just a JRE installed 
and don't require the full SDK) to avoid problems like these:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461683
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498831

3) In my opinion, the whole alternatives setup in the JRE and SDK packages 
should be purged.  It's a relic from times that are long gone, and at the 
moment causes just complexity and possibilities for breakage; it kind of even 
encourages breakage by giving people the option to easily switch between 
_incompatible_ java implementations (e.g. versions) for the system default 
Java, breaking programs' expectations.  environment-modules would sound like a 
more appropriate solution for switching the Java implementation when needed.  
I'm not holding my breath for this to happen too soon, but hope that it 
sometime will.