On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 06:35:06AM -0500, Michael Bilow wrote: > I am curious about the problem referenced about Tomcat 4.0 not being able > to be packaged because it depends upon non-free JAR files from Sun.
The Tomcat 4.0.1 binary distribution contains a lot of JAR archives in the common/lib directory: activation.jar jta.jar naming-resources.jar tyrex.license jdbc2_0-stdext.jar mail.jar servlet.jar xerces.jar jndi.jar naming-common.jar tyrex-0.9.7.0.jar None of them are created from source files in the source archives, they are expected to be present when building Tomcat. The Ant build.xml file for Tomcat 4.0 contains rules like this one: <target name="copy-jndi.jar" if="copy.jndi.jar"> <copy todir="${catalina.build}/common/lib" file="${jndi.jar}"/> </target> So the locally installed JAR files are put in the Tomcat binary distribution. You have to download some of them from Sun first and accept Sun's license. This license allows unmodified redistribution (that's what Tomcat and other Jakarta projects do) but they are -- according to the Debian Free Software Guideliness -- non-free, of course. So if you want to include some of them into a Debian package this package must go to the non-free section. This is what Adam Heath plans to do with his JBoss package but I don't want to maintain a package in non-free. If you want to see Tomcat 4.0 as an official Debian package someone needs to package those non-free JARs separately for Tomcat (and others) to depend on. Please see the thread that started at http://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2001/debian-java-200111/msg00040.html for details. There has also been a discussion the the tomcat-dev mailing list about this topic. The thread started at http://www.mail-archive.com/tomcat-dev%40jakarta.apache.org/msg15517.html The Jakarta project might not even be able to distribute the binary Tomcat archive because they don't include the required licenses. You could get the impresion that everything in the archive was licensed under the Apache license - but some of the JARs are definitely not. Even if someone made a Debian package of Tomcat 4.0 with all these JARs included Debian would not be able to put in into the archive, not even the non-free section. -- Stefan Gybas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]