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Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:45:24 +0100
Message-ID: <f470f68e0904101045l4501fc99jf4d1f74f9a0355b5@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Getting Apache [project] included in Linux distributions
From: Robert Burrell Donkin <robertburrelldonkin@gmail.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
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On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Aidan Skinner <aidan.skinner@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Robert Burrell Donkin
> <robertburrelldonkin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> IMHO apache needs to be more active at getting it's corpus into the
>> distributions. for a long time, the Java Trap stuff was a major social
>> barrier but that should dead and gone now. (isn't it?)
>
> Ish. Dusting off my Linux systems management / build system hat for a
> moment, I'll try to summarise the java specific issues.
>
> OpenJDK and IcedTea are obviously major improvements for the
> Freedom-matters distros. Unfortunately, there's still a couple of
> issues that I'll charitably describe as cultural impedence mismatches.

ever the diplomat :-)

kaffe is fine but myself (and most Java folks i talked to about it)
found the GCJ stuff absolutely dreadful

(Apache and RMS saw Java a little differently: an opportunity as
opposed to a trap. Apache has always been confident in our ability to
- if necessary - develop a new virtual machine, so saw no reason not
to develop FOSS for the platform.)

> Each distro has varying rules about exactly what they require in terms
> of being able to build a package, but the fact that maven goes to the
> network and doesn't look for libs in the standard places a distro puts
> them is a huge barrier to acceptance in all the ones I'm familiar with
> (Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian. It's been a long, long time since I
> contributed packages to FreeBSD but they're historically more flexible
> and Java friendly).

this is just a technical problem, and could be easily enough be fixed
if communication channels were established (for example, over in
James, we use maven local repositories)

> It's a solvable problem though. Qpid moved back to plain ant to make
> shipping the Java components easier[1]. I've got patches to use Ivy,
> but I haven't finished the work (it's still looking for libs in
> something looks like a maven repo, not /usr/lib)

AIUI repository arrangement should be pluggable. perhaps it might be
possible to create a simple patch that could be used by the distros.

> If we're serious about this, lets work with the JPackage people. The
> OpenSUSE build service might be helpful as well.

cool

anyone have any contacts over there?

the advantage of being the upstream is that it's usually easier for us
to get stuff developed than the distros so long as we understand what
they need.

- robert

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