Hi, I did a little digging. Package gcj-3.4 was removed
from Debian Unstable on Aug 14, 2005 because it was
"Not Built by Source"
http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt
Since gcj is the critical path, this suggests to me that
maybe gcj-4.x is the better place to put effort. Andi, do you
and OSAF already have all the communication and clout
you need with gcj devs?
I suppose we could try getting Debian maintainers to lean
on upstream a little bit - not that they responded to my
initial inquiry. And Ubuntu might also care. On the other hand,
gcj is so high profile they may be immune to a little extra
persuasion. Are the bugs rocket sciencish, or can a random C
programmer like me dive in and help? Any other way we can
help?
Other possible TODO items:
* Swig sounds like it is progressing just fine.
* Figure out Java Lucene / Free Software build issues. Barry told me
today on IM that he is interested in this, but he is totally swamped.
I'm also willing to look, I'm just very slow. FYI, Java Lucene
1.4.3 only builds via a Free Software toolchain in Debian Testing
(etch) and Debian Unstable (sid). Debian Stable (sarge) doesn't
have a powerful enough free software toolchain for Java.
* Andi, think about - eventually - having a future PyLucene source
release that is more sourcetastic. For example, maybe include a
tarball of the SVN snapshot and a new build target that untars,
patches, and rebuilds the .jar files. The precompiled .jar files can
still be included. If that's a real pain, then defer because it is
not on the critical path. But this or something like it will eventually
be helpful, especially since it sounds like the gcj-3.4 package
got kicked out of Debian for similar reasons.
>PyLucene only works with Python 2.4 so to make use of it
>ensure you are using /usr/bin/python2.4 and not /usr/bin/python.
* Mathew, the PyLucene module will not be found if one tries to
import it from python 2.3 right? I don't have the PyLucene package
in front of me to double check this.
http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-python.html#s-paths
* I guess backports.org is still an open question.
Anyway, great job on getting this far with the sarge packages.
Matthew, you've already made a significant positive difference, and
I'm already hearing positive comments. Most recently from a hacker
at PARC (my employer) who is actively migrating an internal application
called UpLib from Java Lucene towards PyLucene.
-Jeff
