non-ubuntu packages (was Firefox and gnome dependencies

[Derek Broughton]

On Tuesday 05 April 2005 14:34, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Derek Broughton">
>
> > > Check the build logs: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~lamont/buildLogs/
> >
> > What am I looking for?  Yes, tomcat's there, and every log says "failed"
> > but that doesn't help figure out when I'll be able to get a copy.
> >
> > > I'd strongly discourage mixing packages from different distros/repos.
> > > It's as bad as mixing between Debian branches, if not more so.
> >
> > Certainly more so - I've been mixing Debian branches for years, but the
> > version numbers in testing are always higher than the ones in stable, and
> > unstable's >= testing - but if ubuntu doesn't have the packages, I have
> > to get them somewhere.
>
> Ubuntu does have the packages (they are available as source), but they have
> not built due to the lack of Java. You can get involved with the Ubuntu
> MOTU team to help out with this, or you can rebuild these packages against
> the Java version of your choice (which may not be useful for contribution
> to Ubuntu, because we don't have permission to distribute the available
> JDKs from the likes of Sun and IBM).

I don't understand why a build-depends problem should prevent Tomcat being in 
Ubuntu - it works for Debian, who still make Tomcat depend on non-free 
libraries - but that's not appropriate for this list.  I'll find out what 
MOTU is and see what I can do.  Whatever happens, I won't be building Tomcat 
from source, except perhaps to assist the packagers.  I don't consider it 
appropriate for a Debian-based distro to contain source-only packages - then 
it might as well be Gentoo.
-- 
derek