F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Toshio Kuratomi" <a.badger at gmail.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2013 9:23:29 PM
> Subject: Re: F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java
> 
> On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 08:13:02PM +0100, Marcela Mašláňová wrote:
> > 
> > We were speaking about giving more power to SIGs related to
> > discussion about Fedora.next. This can be a good start. Stano and
> > Aleksandar are working on Java maintenance a lot, Java SIG members
> > are speaking together, so I have a confidence in their actions.
> > 
> This is a tangent but -- some people have been talking about giving more
> power to SIGs but at the last env and stacks meeting we sorta settled on
> more power to SIGs in an experimental, anything-goes repo.  We're not
> tlaking about that here.

I have no idea what was discussed at these meetings but the thing is if such thing would happen it would only happen if we do it - history has proved that changes don't happen magically by themself. If one is forced to do something he doesn't think is the correct he would not do it and if the Java SIG doesn't step in to drive this change we all lose. While something might sound as the better engineered solution it doesn't matter if it "burns bridges" to other communities and I do care for e.g. Mageia developers as they do better than our mass-rebuilds as problems they find often come back to us even with a patch. 
Not to mention that simply concentrating on what I would call a "temporary solution" is a mistake too and as such should be done with minimal changes. Modularizing and naming will come from the OpenJDK upstream in Java 8 to some extend(Compact Profiles). If such a thing happens to be such a problem and lose time discussing things that are proved to not work who would even dare to try pushing them into Fedora. If upstream OpenJDK has a "headless" mode - inventing new name will break the stay close to upstream, if well established project like Debian calls the same thing "headless" - we reduce chances to share and collaboration as we end up people explaining what does x11 and what does headless mean in conversation, if this is a subject of a change soon - why not let current maintainers do it as they want and get involved into helping get the profiles. For me this is implementation detail, which gives nothing but bad feeling into current maintainers as people involved into the actual work already agreed on the solution - not perfect but the most acceptable one.

Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team

> 
> -Toshio
> 
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