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Tom Marble's Weblog

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« Chocolat Belge | Main | Grizzly Roars »
20070211 Sunday February 11, 2007

ITP That Cool Java Thing

ITP means Intent To Package and is what how you inform others that you want to make some interesting software available in a distro specific format. In the case of Debian this activity is all managed by the pseudo-package wnpp (Work-Needing and Prospective Packages). One of the results of the early launch of OpenJDK is that now there is a great deal of interest in providing packages for all sorts of cool Java libraries and applications.

It's important to recognize that JPackage has been providing this service for some time. But this work has often been hampered by restrictive licensing. It should be clear by now that we are revisiting our entire software portfolio for greater liberalization. There are several Java related packages for Debian with an ITP in the wnpp queue. And several developers have asked me, privately, about packaging various libraries. My answer is go for it! And, if the licensing is a problem let me know and I'll get in contact with responsible team to consider alternate licensing.

For instance I was recently talking with some developers of the state of liberalization of Java related imaging and graphics packages. Did you know that many of these libraries are available (or soon will be) under an open source license?

[Java2D and OpenGL]
* in the list above means that re-licensing the software is under consideration.

[Vertex Program Refract]

It's quite likely that this list is incomplete, but my point is there are a lot of cool graphics libraries that can be packaged now as open source software and we can consider packaging the remainder in anticipation of the license changes. In fact there are many cool Java libraries and applications in general now that more of the graph of dependencies is getting liberated.

The point of graphics libraries seems clear to see, but what about other Java libraries? One of the more controversial Java programs that packagers are considering is maven2. I suspect that one of the reasons that Maven causes so much concern for distro packagers in particular is -- even though it has the facility to download (and build) dependent libraries on the fly -- it tends to squirrel them away in the user's home directory (which kind of defeats distro packaging systems that work quite hard to insure that users will have a safe and mutually interoperable set of packages).

If you are interested this kind of debate you may want to drop in on Freenode #fedora-java tomorrow (Monday) as overholt is leading a Java specfile reviewfest on maven2 and it's dependent libraries.

I want to thank mjw for calling that meeting to my attention and for providing an example of a dependency graph idea that mentioned I'd like to build to highlight the the liberation status of Sun software packages. I can't wait to replace mjw's graph with one for NetBeans!

Posted by tmarble ( Feb 11 2007, 10:39:18 PM CST ) Permalink

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