[fedora-java] Saner Java packaging

[Matthias Klose]

On 05.03.2010 17:31, Alexander Kurtakov wrote:
> Time to bring GCJ support discussion back.
> We should find a way to not install java-1.5.0-gcj on every users computers.
> There are packages that do not work with it and it's plain wrong to install it
> as a dependency of this packages which are explicitly requiring java 1.6.0.
> Possible solutions:
>   * Solution 1 - someone who cares for the gcj stack finds a way to not require
> java-1.5.0-gcj when there are gcj bits in the package so we do not force gcj
> installation on every user.
>   * Solution 2 - drop gcj support from packages, interested maintainers can add
> gcj bits as a subpackage which requires java-1.5.0-gcj. I think that this is
> what Debian is doing.

Debian does do this, however it's tricky to have the -gcj packages installed. 
current practice is that libfoo-java recommends libfoo-java-gcj, with 
recommendations installed by default. This installs at least the gij runtime 
components by default. dropping these recommendations to suggestions gives poor 
runtime performance when using gij. at least on architectures where openjdk 
doesn't provide a jit and gij/gcj works well enough, this is a performance 
penalty.  at least dpkg/apt doesn't know a way to only recommend a 
libfoo-java-gcj if the gij/gcj-jre package is installed.

   Matthias