JPackage and Fedora

[Matthew Dahlman]

Hi all,

I've got a question about JPackage. Before getting to the question I'll
give a bit of background. JasperServer, like most Java apps running in an
application server, does not directly ship the source for many of our .jar
dependencies; we retrieve them from trusted maven repositories. Anyone
that's interested can track down the source to any of the jar files, but
we don't normally ship it. This may not be in keeping with Fedora's
guidelines.

Therefore it would be good if we had a standard way to distribute the
various jars along with their source. That brings us to JPackage (JPP).
According to their site (http://www.jpackage.org/aboutjpp.php):
The JPackage Project has two primary goals:
- To provide a coherent set of Java software packages for Linux,
satisfying all quality requirements of other applications. 
- To establish an efficient and robust policy for Java software packaging
and installation.

I also noticed that Fedora includes jpackage-utils by default. This brings
me, finally, to my question. Is JPackage the correct place to direct our
efforts to get all of our jar dependencies included?

I'm hoping for answers somewhere along this continuum:

"Yes, JPackage is the one and only place for work like this. Fedora
officially supports this project and recommends that all Java apps use
it."
or
"Yes, JPackage is a reasonable place for this work. There are some details
to work out because they do a few things differently from Fedora best
practices. Alternatively you could use X or Y."
or
"No, those JPackage guys will be the death of Java as we know it. Maybe of
death of Linux and of life as we know it as well."

Depending on people's thoughts on this I imagine we'll eventually get into
separate detailed threads on how JPackage works with foo.jar here and/or
on the JPackage mailing list.

Thanks,
Matt
Jaspersoft