[fedora-java] Summary: Velocity/Maven/Doxia issues in F13 and devel

[Mary Ellen Foster]

Hello all,

Unfortunately, there is an issue to do with velocity and maven plugins
in F13 and devel. Alexander Kurtakov and I have been working on trying
to fix it, but it's getting a bit ugly, and my time to work on Fedora
things comes and goes with busy-ness at my $DAYJOB ... anyway, we
wanted to explain the situation.

A while ago, I (perhaps rashly) updated velocity in rawhide from 1.4.x
to 1.6.3, and that change has eventually landed in F-13. This update
unfortunately produces errors when making use of maven-doxia, for
example as part of building jetty (which therefore currently FTBFS on
F-13/rawhide). It seems that the current maven-doxia relies on some
velocity 1.4.x features that changed in 1.6.x. :(

So akurtakov and I have been trying to rebuild maven-doxia and its
dependencies to get around this. We managed to get some way along this
path: we have SRPMs for new versions of maven-doxia,
maven-doxia-sitetools, and plexus-utils. But rebuilding these things
in turn breaks a number of maven plugins, including javadoc-plugin and
site-plugin. Alexander has managed to create an SRPM of the javadoc
plugin that builds, and I'm currently working on the site-plugin, but
this still seems like the tip of the iceberg. Also, various annoying
issues come up because the Fedora is still on maven 2.0.8, and a lot
of the latest plugin versions that work with the new doxia require
newer versions of maven to build.

I'm starting to think that it's best to (*shudder*) add an Epoch to
velocity in F-13 and downgrade it back to 1.4 so that at least it's
not broken when it's released. We can then try to work towards fixing
things in devel, possibly as part of a larger maven upgrade.

I'm sorry that things are in this state, but hopefully it's possible to fix ...

MEF

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster -- http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~mef3/
Interaction Lab -- http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/InteractionLab
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity
number SC000278