More Java guidelines questions

[Andrew Haley]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Andrew Haley wrote:
>> Jerry James wrote:
>>> I've just been looking at bug 262401 [1] to see what I need to do to
>>> update it to the new Java packaging guidelines.  I have 2 new
>>> questions about the guidelines.
>>>
>>> First, the guidelines say that I must both Requires and Build-Requires
>>> jpackage-utils.  This bit of code needs nothing in jpackage-utils that
>>> I can discern.  It has no external dependencies, doesn't ship with any
>>> binary blobs, etc.  The guidelines say must, so I'll do it, but what
>>> is the rationale?
>>>
>>> Second, the GCJ guidelines say, "For Fedora versions < 8, no JDK was
>>> available other than GCJ so GCJ AOT bits MUST be present."  This
>>> presents a problem for the package in question, because it consists of
>>> annotations only.  They are Java 1.5 annotations, so the GCJ in F7 can
>>> produce the needed class files.  But there is no actual code to
>>> compile, so there is nothing for the GCJ AOT bits to do.  Can an
>>> exception be granted to annotation-only packages (not that there are
>>> likely to be many of those)?
>>
>> Amazing -- I never even imagined that such a thing as an annotation-only
>> package might exist!  The guidelines are intended to allow reasonable
>> people to interpret them sensibly.  In this case, AOT-compiling wouldn't
>> hurt but wouldn't be of much benefit, so I don't think it matters.
>>
> Andrew, if you could propose some wording changes to the Guidelines for
> this it would be most appreciated.

OK.

"In some rare cases Java packages might not contain any executable code
whatsoever, so AOT-compiling for gcj would not be required.  An example
of such a package would be one that contained only annotations."

Andrew.