[Fedora-packaging] Java packaging guidelines draft

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

Andrew Overholt wrote:
> * Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> [2008-03-26 10:21]:
>> On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 10:14 -0400, Andrew Overholt wrote:
>>
>>> Are you satisfied with Nicolas' answer on this one?
>> I'd still prefer a rewording there, to clearly state that if/when the
>> two documents are in conflict, the Fedora Java Guidelines win.
> 
> Done.  Let me know if it's not good enough.
> 
>>>> 8. "%{_jnidir} usually expands into /usr/lib/java." This should probably
>>>> be %{_libdir}/java.
>>> I'd like Tom to comment here but I'm not sure multilib-ifying
>>> jpackage-utils is possible right now.
>> Is nothing in the Java space multilib? If not, maybe we can let this
>> slide as is, but I suspect lots of Java stuff is multilib, and we need
>> to get this fixed.
> 
> Java stuff is noarch, normally.  Existing packages that are built with
> gcj have lots of workarounds to deal with multilib issues
> (brp-repack-jars; the unpacking and repacking of jars to set the
> creation dates to 1980-01-01 at the end of eclipse.spec, etc.).  It will
> be nice to fix these issues and having OpenJDK JIT support on more
> arches will help.
> 
> fitzsim, any more thoughts here?

Java will not properly support multilib until this longstanding rpm bug 
is fixed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=340391

It causes alternatives symlink breakage when 32- and 64-bit JDKs are 
installed in parallel.

Recently, I've been working on a patch to rpm to fix this, but it's 
taking me longer than I had hoped.

After that's fixed there still remains: making jpackage-utils itself 
multilib, making the JDK packages multilib-compatible, (we already have 
patches for these first two), and testing the upgrade paths from noarch 
jpackage-utils to multilib jpackage-utils, and the upgrade paths from 
no-multilib-support JDK packages to multilib-supporting JDK packages. 
These upgrade path tests will need to be done for Fedora and RHEL packages.

I was trying to have this done by Fedora 9, but we'll have to aim for 
Fedora 10 now.  It could even be considered a full-fledged Fedora 10 
"Feature".

Tom