On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 06:58:46PM -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote: > We must come to terms with the fact that a Debian Java policy cannot be > built with proprietary VMs in mind. There is no "make it work" when it > comes to proprietary software and Debian.
The problem, as I see it, is that Java core classes are grouped into entities like "JDK 1.2", when, by and large, these groups are not represented in Debian (or in free Java in general). Instead, they implement some subset of this functionality. However, the classes are still grouped this way in the JVM (rt.jar and such). So we can neither have useful JDK-level dependencies (because they're never met), nor can we have useful package- or class-level dependencies, because you can't mix and match core classes. The most practical solution at this point seems to be what everyone is doing anyway, which is to use or-expressions which reflect what actually works, and not an abstract idea of what is provided. For example, a package which works with any java2 runtime, but also works with the interfaces provided by kaffe, uses "java2-runtime | kaffe", etc. -- - mdz
