[fedora-java] About "Docs/Beats/Java" and jpackage

[Mary Ellen Foster]

I was just looking at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats/Java
and saw that it mentions installing packages from JPackage directly.
Note that it's not actually possible, in my experience, to install
packages from JPackage on Fedora 7 because of the following:
- Fedora has an RPM-older version of jpackage-utils than JPackage
- Fedora's jpackage-utils provides rebuild-security-providers, while
JPackage's doesn't
- All of the JPackage packages depend on their version of jpackage-utils
- Many of the Fedora packages depend on rebuild-security-providers

All of this means that JPackage packages can't really be used on
Fedora. There are also issues to do with Lucene and Geronimo, but
they're probably less fundamental. I described all of this in a post
to the JPackage list in June when I first tried using JPackage on
Fedora:
    https://www.zarb.org/pipermail/jpackage-discuss/2007-June/011536.html

Also, the highest version of Fedora that JPackage seems to officially
support is FC6 (see http://www.jpackage.org/yum.php). So I'm not sure
it's helpful even to point people at JPackage for Fedora 8, because
I'm not sure there's much useful they can do with it.

MEF

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/