[Fedora-packaging] Java packaging guidelines draft

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 14:23 -0400, Deepak Bhole wrote:
> * Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> [2008-03-28 12:55]:
> > On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 09:50 -0400, Fernando Nasser wrote:
> > > We had agreed on an "exit clause" of dropping this when the RPM/yum 
> > > Capabilities (?) feature became available to replace the deprecated 
> > > Groups, so we could mark packages with various attributes like
> > > "Java", 
> > > "JPP" etc, and select them at will in all sorts of operations.
> > 
> > This could just as easily go in the "Group:" tag, and not complicate the
> > n-v-r.
> > 
> 
> No easy to sort with that though. With the release having jpp in there,
> one can just do rpm -qa | grep jpp
> 
> As for the reason why sort is needed... well, Java is sort of a special
> case in that it is the only set that has all packages available from a
> different vendor. So if someone wants to replace the Fedora Java stack
> with the JPackage Java stack or vice versa, they need to be able to
> easily find out the set..

This is a pretty silly line of reasoning.  If people are replacing the
entire stack, then _something_ is being done wrong.  

Either we're 
a) providing an adequate and effective Java environment (... which is
what I think we're doing) in which case, we don't _want_ our users going
off and replacing things wholesale like you're saying.  
b) Or we're not.  In which case, we should stop sucking and fix it.

If Java gets a free ride of specialness here, then why not do the same
when someone start GPackage.org (with packages of all your GNOME desktop
bits!) or KPackage.org.  But we don't do that.  In fact, we've
explicitly worked hard such that the KDE bits in Fedora are good rather
than having people go off and use kde-redhat (hats off to Rex for his
work here)

Jeremy