JPackage and Fedora

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Lee Faus wrote:

> Alfresco is in the same boat.  Not allowing binary compatible RPMs from 
> a third party repo only causes proliferation.  Plus you can end up with 
> version conflicts.  JPackage is the defacto location for Java RPMs, not 
> Fedora.  I also notice that a number of Fedora Java RPMs already are JPP 
> packages based on the naming convention.  The folks from Fedora grab the 
> source RPM from JPackage and then recompile it to get it to run under 
> Fedora.  There are some problems with this approach because you don't 
> know what version of Java this package was compiled against.  GCJ, 
> IcedTea, OpenJava, it is a big assumption that you can compile it under 
> one and get it to run under another (try compliling Hibernate under 
> GCJ).  There needs to be a common repository of ONLY java packages. 
> Why Fedora wants to duplicate work that is already established and 
> replicate disk space just doesn't make sense.

Perhaps this is exactly right.

It's all about how one defines the platform.  The goal of a software 
repository is to make it simple to get software trivially installed on a 
particular platform, and to make sure that the work of maintaining that 
platform is shared by its users.

Fedora is one class of platform.  JREs are another class of platform.

It is possible to have repositories with dependencies that only go one 
way.  Livna, for example, has many dependencies on packages in the Fedora 
universe -- but not the other way around.  So you end up with a tree 
structure of repos, essentially.

Perhaps it's time to formalize how this multi-repo policy should work.  I 
think the approach of banging everything into Fedora is starting to show 
its limitations.

--g