On Saturday 19 April 2003 19:31, Daniel Bonniot wrote: > I am the upstream author of the Nice language, which is an extension of > Java with many advanced features. It is released under the GPL. > Homepage: http://nice.sourceforge.net
Looks nice ;) Though I have to say that what it tries to do does not have to imply all the syntactic changes I see, or is all that really necessary? Making so many changes to the syntax makes moving from Java<->Nice too difficult. > Being a faithful Debian user, I started building and distributing debian > packages for the compiler a few month ago. The compiler is now getting > stable, and the user base is growing, so I would be glad to see it enter > Debian itself. So I have reviewed again the package creation process, > reread the different policies (Debian and Java). It seems OK to me, so > it would be great to get comments from experienced Debian developers. > > I made the package available at: http://nice.sourceforge.net/debian/ I am downloading it. > I am looking for a sponsor for this package. I am not a Debian developer (yet), so technically I cannot 'sponsor' you. However, I will email you my experiences with the file you put online. > A few notes: > > The package cannot yet be built entirely with free tools (it needs a JVM > at build time to run the bootstrap compiler). It works with kaffe from > CVS, but not 1.0.7, so I hope there will be a new release soon. Have you file a wishlist bug against kaffe? Or even a bug, when it's a bug that causes the problem. > I also made bug reports to sablevm and gcj upstream. Good. > So either way, hopefully a > free solution will be there soon. Before that, is it possible to > build-depend on j2re1.3 | j2re1.4 ? I see that eclipse does that, and is > in contrib. Though I wonder how the autobuilder can handle this, since > the blackdown packages are not in in the Debian archives at all. Good question for the FAQ. > The compiler is partly written in itself, so it needs a working version > to build it and bootstrap. I suppose the right way to handle this is to > include the necessary jar in the source (I think the ocaml package also > does that). Mmm... interesting one. > Being both the upstream author and the packager, the debian/ durectory > is in the main CVS repository, and I produced a native Debian package, > using cvs-buildpackage. Is that OK? (I read an old thread about this, > which seemed positive). AFAIK, this is not OK. Though I used to do it myself too. The correct way, I believe is to make a tar.gz file, like the one which is online, and build the Debian package from that. I think the reason is that it is now possible to fully get a list of changes that were needed to make the Debian package. Which is not possible when you do a cvs-buildpackage. The latter is reserved (again AFAIK) for Debian only packages, when there are *no* changes to record. > There could still be packaging-only changes in the future, which would > only increase the revision number (omitted for the main releases). Ofcourse. kind regards, Egon
