On Thursday 20 July 2006 12:12 pm, you wrote: > We need some sort of policy how to deal with software written in > Java. We have a number of ports that are basically just wrappers > that install pre-compiled Java byte code. Additional ports in this > style have been proposed. Actual Java source may or may not be > available, but it is certainly not used by the ports in question.
All the ports I maintain have src available. IFAIK all java ports have src available. There have been various replies to this thread that assume otherwise but please take a moment to look first. Please stop continuing this FUD. > Some people--Marc Balmer has been very outspoken--dislike this > approach, because we are just wrapping other people's binaries. Lets be clear here, these are java byte-code binaries that run inside the jvm. No native executable is installed from a third party. > Instead, ports should fetch the source and newly compile the code. > The counter argument from the Java people is that Java byte code > is machine-independent, compiling it afresh will just produce the > very same binaries, adding build time for no gain. An additional > complication is that passing around binary archives seems well-accepted > in the Java scene, posing problems of obtaining the actual source > code and exploding dependency requirements. It is not a matter of accessing the source code. It is a matter of trust, build time and unnecessary complications to porting new java programs to OpenBSD. Take tomcat for example. Apache has been distributing this for many many years. There are no native componets to tomcat. Pure java byte-code. The same byte-code runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. etc. The whole world trusts the byte code released by Apache. Why should we not? If we convert tomcat/v4 to build from src for example, there will be a *significant* increase in package build time on arm and sparc especially. Currenly devel/jdk/1.3 doesn't even need to be built by bulk package builders to package tomcat/v4. Building tomcat from src in ports will add unnecessary complications of exploding the number of dependencies. For what gain? > How are we going to deal with this? > > Some preliminary discussion at the last hackathon produced the > opinion that even Java ports should be built from source by all > means. However, that discussion didn't include any of our porters > who are interested in Java... The source requirement may render > various ports impossible or impracticably difficult. We'll need to > decide whether we put our foot down here. For the last few years, java on OpenBSD has been mostly a one man show. I was hoping by now there would be more involvement from other folks. If we take what I consider to be an unreasonable stance on this we might as well delete all the java ports because who is going to do the work and maintain it all? I certainly cant. -Kurt
