Hi Ben, --- Ben Burton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I'd like to point out that I wasn't advocating > that > > the debian maintainer tracks all VMs available > for > > debian all the time. Just that she specifies a > (i.e. > > at least one ;) free VM that the application works > > with in order to be in 'debian-free'. > > Mm.. what worries me about this is that if I (say) > choose Kaffe as my > working JVM and my package has Depends: kaffe, then > all other users are > forced to install kaffe even if my package happens > to work on most or > all other JVMs. > > Perhaps Depends: kaffe | java1-runtime to show the > user that I know it > works on kaffe but to allow a user to install some > other JVM instead?
That seems logical to me: if you know that your app works on gcj, kaffe and sablevm, then you'd specify them explicitely, for the unknown rest you'd use javaX-runtime, cross your fingers and wait for the bug reports. How many bug reports you get will from users of not-explicitely specified VMs depends on how liberal the maintainers of these VMs handle javaX-runtime, and that's probably out of your control. And of course, if users of a not-explicitely-specified VM contacted you telling that it all works great, you could add them to the "officially endorsed" mix. But I guess that's where that debian java policy thing comes in ;) The drawback is that it all makes your dependencies larger, and probably kills most of the benefits provided by having a purely virtual javax-runtime. On the other hand, given that the state of things is as it is, I think it's a good compromise between locking down users to a single VM that works out of the box, and implementing all the missing functionality in all the free VMs out there ;) I assume (i.e. I don't know, and I don't feel like digging through years of debian-java archives) that prior to having a unified javax-runtime, debian has used a system like that. Why was it changed? Did the expected benefits materialize? cheers, dalibor topic __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
