Hi,
The folks at JPackage.org already track several Jakarta projects and issue RPMs for them: for example, they've been doing this with Tomcat for a long time. We appreciate their work. We've spoken on the tomcat-dev list about issuing our own RPMs, and I think it was Costin (Manolache) who was very interested and knowledgable in this area, so he might be a good person to ask if you're interested in more Jakarta/RPM work.
I'm just very unhappy with the current status and how linux distributors are packaging java projects ( tomcat in particular ).
The problem is that each distributor ( RedHat/Fedora in particular ) are
using a layout different from each other, making it harder to support. On top of this - Fedora is using native compilation, a great technology but not very stable yet.
On tomcat - the conclusion was that we could distribute our own rpms, if we can make it easy to build them and integrate this in the normal build
( and a special requirement - have this working on windows too ). I didn't have time to implement this yet.
One problem with RPM is that it is both a packaging/install tool ( like InstallShield or tar.gz ) but it is also at the same time a build tool, like make or ant. And you need special setup to build RPMs using the rpm spec on Windows, Mac or Debian computers (it is possible, but not very simple out of box ). As a solution - I started on an Ant <rpm> task
that would just create the rpm file from the distribution files, without using a .spec and all the special steps ( just like the windows installer does ).
JPackage.org is a great source for java packages - and at least they are self-consistent and work on any linux (RPM-based) distribution. But just like the other distributors, their layout is different from the official distribution layout.
While I don't like linux distributors and the fragmentation they create, I think it's also our fault for not distributing "official" RPM files, to keep the products consistent both across various linux distros but also across platforms.
Costin
I know the above is off-topic for this thread, but since the thread is dying anyways (the OP was a classic "I'll send a clueless rant and disappear" type), and this is relevant (and of increasing concern as various linux flavors gain popularity not just in our community, but on our users' desktops).
Yoav
-----Original Message-----
From: Noel J. Bergman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 10:42 AM
To: Jakarta General List
Subject: RE: Jakarta - A study in self defeating projects
Henri Gomez wrote:
If some people found hard to install and glue jakarta software (not
products) together they should consider JPackage.org ready to use
RPMS. This Linux project make a cross distribution coherent Java
distribution, which is now used by Mandrake, Suse and Redhat.
If you can think of some way of validating the contents of the RPMs
(e.g.,
if they were part of the release testing process and signed by an ASF
release manager), maybe we could do something with jpackage.org. Or
add
the
RPMs to our dist/ tree.
--- Noel
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