Matthew, Given Andi's comments, one possibility is to put the PyLucene package into Debian, but under the contrib section and marking it with appropriate bug entries. The hope would be people could improve the build situation over time.
Another possibility - maybe - is to package an older version of PyLucene that depends on Java Lucene 1.4.3. However, I suspect there are likely to be similar issues and an upatched Java Lucene 1.4.3 will not be a viable build dependency either. A third possibility is to simply wait and hope the situation gets better. Since both Java Lucene 1.9 and PyLucene have an rc in their version numbers, this is not a completely crazy idea. On the other hand, it may be a really long wait. A fourth possibility is to modify the Debian PyLucene package such that it first builds the patched Java Lucene .jar from .java files. That's kind of messy, and redundant, but may not have any blockers. I am putting the Debian Java packaging team on the CC: list in case someone there has a suggestion or comment. Officially, the Java Lucene package is jointly maintained by this team. The extended discussion and context for this email is here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256283 The requirement to get into Debian main is a complete build from source, using a Free Software toolchain, contolled by the Debian packaging system. Other sections of Debian relax some of these requirements. In any case, I will look over other apects of the package for possible improvements. Jeff
