On 09/02/2011 06:12, tony mancill wrote: >> etc. So it seems either that nobody cares about getting these fine >> (and popular) applications into Debian, or it's just too hard to do >> given the current set of policies. > > I think this is a fair point. It *is* very difficult to package > large Java applications for Debian. (There happens to be a similar > thread on this topic on debian-gis at the moment as well.) From the > point of view of a software company that wants to provide a .deb of > their application, it is a huge amount of additional work, and it's > not always clear what sort of immediate return on investment this > will garner the software vendor.
I'd say that this one of the main added value of a distribution: many different pieces of software harmonized together, under a consistent policy so that people that want to change something in the source code and recompile just have to do apt-get source, hack the code and dpkg-buildpackage. Of course I'm not pretending that this is going to satisfy all the kind of users: it's just what Debian users are expecting, so it's what Debian is offering to its users. Probably other distributions make things differently because they are targeted to users with different needs. Other users could prefer the way maven works, so they will use maven to install their package. About the difficulty of having a Java application in Debian, I cannot agree more with Tony: packaging things in Debian is difficult, because it requires some added value that the packager must put into the package, and added value requires time. This is true especially in the Java environment, where many programmers put very low attention to many things that Debian cares about (and that have been already discussed in this thread). I'm not discussing who is right and who is not (though I have an idea about it, but it could be significantly biased): simply, the two ways of work have very little intersection. And, unfortunately, one of the core philosophies in Debian is that we're not trading quality for time or package number: if the available resources (that is, people that contribute to Debian) are scarce, then what we're giving up is quantity, not quality. Usually we're also able to offer quantity, but it's not our main focus. BTW, in my little experience, I've already met at least two different pieces of software written in Java that were non free or even non redistributable because of licensing issues rising from putting JARs or copy and pasting code without checking if they were allowed to do so. I'm proud to say that, thanks to my work, now these pieces of software are really free in Debian: I'm sure this is not the only case, but it shows why all the thorough work that a Debian package needs it's useful. Giovanni. -- Giovanni Mascellani <mascell...@poisson.phc.unipi.it> Pisa, Italy Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani Jabber: g.mascell...@jabber.org / giova...@elabor.homelinux.org
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