[fedora-java] Fedora & JPackage

[David Walluck]

Jerry James wrote:
> Both events made me wonder how much we are gaining by drawing spec
> files from JPackage, and how much we are losing.  I wondered whether
> maintainers were not moving forward to newer versions of their
> packages because the JPackage versions were not moving forward.  So I

I have a similar table listing the jbossas dependencies in JPackage and 
Fedora. I found that many more packages were up to date in JPackage and 
that many packages don't even exist in Fedora.

The simple fact is that there are very few people packaging for 
JPackage, and even less packging for Java for Fedora. There is also a 
very anti-Java attitude from most Fedora users. Packages are even harder 
to maintain when people try to fracture such a small community in this way.

I am not sure what the exact problem is that you're uncovering. We can 
take the junit4 as an example: (a) junit4 in JPackage is newer than 
Fedora (before I updated it) and (b) junit4 in JPackage has a full 
version of hamcrest while Fedora didn't have any version (before I 
updated it and hacked it up). The hamcrest package was created primarily 
by non-Red Hat employess/non-Fedora contributors.

Also, concerning your webpage:

There is no findbugs-specific version of bcel---they simply need a 
version which has a certain fix in CVS. I didn't make any assumptions 
here---I verified this with the findbugs devs upstream.

The maintainer of cryptix-asn1 probably had a good reason for the 
snapshot. It's very common in the Java world to use all sorts of 
unreleased versions of software upstream, and that bad practice is 
sometimes trickles down unavoidably.

The jcip-annotations and jsr-305 versions are taken from maven, so since 
this is what upstream refers to them by, then I assume them to be correct.

-- 
Sincerely,

David Walluck
<david at zarb.org>