Planet Mandriva & JPackage

Yeay, John Keller just added my blog to Planet Mandriva! :)

So maybe about time for me to write a new blog entry on this occation..

Also a good time to write some Mandriva related things I've been working on lately. :)

One of those are JPackage & java packages in Mandriva! I've devoted a lot of time to lately is java stuff as I'm working on EDOS for my bachelor project.

One thing I've used much time on is integrating efforts from this into Mandriva as well as improve current java support, one of the results from this so far is the Sun Java packages in non-free now which all Mandriva users can install very easy now (java-1.5.0-sun & java-1.6.0-sun will also show up in non-free/backports for 2007.0 ASAP btw.). Trying to package all dependencies needed for your project has not been that pleasant unfortunately.. Java developers tend to be very fond of this "compile once, run everywhere" thing and distributes just the java binary packages with their software without much references about their origin or anything, so tracking down these are not that easy. This is not such a big problem compared to one I stumbled across in my hunt for these.. Some of the dependencies has gazillions of dependencies with their own gazillion of dependencies again, I've benefitted a lot from JPackage, but their packages aren't of such a great quality and one has to fork and clean up every package one needs for inclusion in Mandriva and a lot of the dependencies I need aren't even in jpackage… This sucks, and the thought of having to maintain every jpackage package I've forked so far and try keep them in sync with jpackage is not that very tempting, especially not when thinking of all the rest of dependencies..

So, what to do? JPackage does a lot of good work, but benefitting from their packages in Mandriva without a lot of work and headache is not very possible in it's current shape.. Therefore I've started looking into how to improve this situation and make their packages clean and usable for ~every rpm-based distros! This isn't really that hards, what is really needed is some clever packaging, macros and policies and most things is adressed.

JPackage guys is very positive towards this and I've started working on it, my work so far can be found at the Mandriva wiki.

Most of my ideas are already in place and most of what's left is just to implement this which will be started on after JPackage releases their 1.7 release. In the meantime I've started on this locally in Mandriva Cooker.

For 2007.1 java support is a lot better now, for 2008 I'm hoping for it to be way better! :)

Sjallabais!

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