Hello list, Having read the new Draft page, read again another time many pages on the wiki, in the Java FAQ and in the Java Policy, the java-common bugs, I still stay with the feeling that there is no clear roadmap for Java in Debian, beginning with the Java Policy.
Information is available, here and there, but is frequently obsolete and scattered in numerous places. Experiments and prototypes have been done to solve the CLASSPATH problem, for instance, but no clear and "best" solution has been promoted in the Policy. For years, there have been discussions on debian-java, but the best ideas have not always been promoted in the Java Policy or Java FAQ. Compared with other policies, the Java Policy appears as an alpha draft, with many missing information, either for the Java developper or the Java packager. In this email, I've tried to create the structure of a new Java Policy. My goal was to list all the points that should appear in a complete and extensive Java Policy. There are probably missing ones, and the discussions on the list will pinpoint them and add them to this content list. I expect at least 50% changes! I've tried to be exhaustive in the contents list, at least to give to the future reader or to debian-java discussions the impression that the point has not been missed. Writing that something is irrelevant is richer information than lack of reference. Or for reference to external sources of information. Also, one of the first step is to define precisely the scope of the Java Policy. As the group of Java developpers and packagers on Debian is more limited than for languages like PHP or Perl, I thought that the Java Policy had to be more practical than the equivalent policies for these languages, and include information that we would expect in a Developper Guide. So I have created this table of contents in the spirit of listing the best practices for Java Developpers _and_ Packagers. The Java FAQ will remain complementary for how-to information or beginners questions; and the wiki for fast moving ideas or experiments... Then, with a complete Java Policy Table of Contents, we should been able to fill in the text between the headers, consolidating the information already in the Wiki, debian-java and the bugs system, and of course the present Java Policy draft. I think that having a common structured road map for the Java Policy will help to achieve this long standing graal of Java use on Debian. What do you think? -- Pierre Métras Proposed Java Policy table of contents 1 About this manual 1.2 Scope 1.2.3 Java packages interface definition 1.2.4 Best practices for packagers and developpers 1.3 New versions of this document 1.4 Authors and Maintainers 1.4.3 How to submit updates 1.5 Related documents 1.6 Terms and conventions 2 The Debian Archive 2.2 The package name 2.3 Main, contrib or non-free 2.4 Virtual packages 2.5 Packages relationships 2.6 Subsections 2.7 Tags 3 Binary packages 3.2 Versions and Sun versionning 3.3 User interaction 4 The Operating System 4.2 File system hierarchy 4.2.3 Libraries 4.2.4 Applications 4.2.5 Web applications 4.2.6 Pluggins 4.2.7 Applets 4.3 Environment variables 4.4 Architecture independance 4.5 binfmt_misc registration 4.6 Menus 4.7 Documents associations 4.8 MIME types 5 Virtual Machines 5.2 Free JVM 5.3 Alternatives 5.4 How to find the current JVM 5.5 How to build the CLASSPATH 5.6 Extensions 5.7 Fonts 5.8 Security policies 5.9 Compilers 5.10 Other tools 6 Java libraries 6.2 Class files 6.3 Manifest 6.4 Java archives: JAR 6.5 Native libraries 7 Applications 7.2 Wrappers 7.3 Run-time dependencies detection 8 Applets and pluggins 9 Web applications 9.2 Web containers 9.2.3 Tomcat 9.3 Users, groups, file permissions 9.4 Web archives: WAR, EAR... 9.5 WEB-INF 9.6 Contexts, virtual hosts and configuration 9.6.3 Apache front-end 9.6.4 webapps-common 9.7 External libraries 9.8 Logs 10 Build scripts and IDE 10.2 Ant 10.3 Eclipse/Netbeans 11 Configuration and external files 11.2 Configuration files 11.2.3 Permissions and ownership 11.3 Encoding of text files 11.4 Language files 12 Documentation 12.2 Manual pages 12.3 Javadoc 12.3.3 doc-base 13 Tests 13.2 Junit 14 Misc 14.2 Databases 14.2.3 db-config-common 14.2.4 JDBC 14.3 Network services 15 Advices to Java packagers 15.2 Package maintainers scripts 15.3 CLASSPATH 15.4 Libraries dependencies 16 Advices to Java developpers Annexes Best practices Best tools for Java development on Debian Sun java command line options for compatible alternatives Sun javac command line options for compatible alternatives Ant common build targets CLASSPATH creation example Wrapper with run-time dependencies checks (install vs run-time dependencies example) Javadoc creation and doc-base registration Packaging example for web-app registration with tomcat, jonas, jigsaw, jetty...
