Adding a tag to wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Tags

[Jordan Mantha]

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 7:58 AM, Emmet Hikory <persia at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Bug Squad,
>    There's a class of bugs with Java applications that depend on the
> full Java Runtime Environment when they could depend on a headless
> Java Runtime Environment (no video or audio support).  Ensuring that
> applications which don't need video or audio support use this headless
> JRE is an important step towards being able to use Java well on
> servers (which are often headless).
>
>    I've seen at least one bug that complained about the dependencies
> of a Java application being too complex (why is X required for a
> *command line* tool?), and suspect there will be more as we get closer
> to the goal and build an expectation in users that Java should work in
> headless mode.
>
>    To ease the work of developers chasing this goal, I'd like to
> request that the "java-headless" tag be used for bugs that address
> excessive dependencies of Java applications where those excessive
> dependencies include spurious requests for X or audio libraries.  I've
> started using this tag myself for cases where I find bugs of this
> type, but would like to add it to Bugs/Tags in the hopes of increasing
> the number of people who might see such bugs and add the tag so that
> those people working on the problem may have their work better
> directed.
>
>    I'd like to hear comments from others for or against the addition
> of this tag to the Bugs/Tags page.  With luck, we'll complete the
> transition in intrepid, but more likely intrepid+1, so this tag will
> have a limited lifespan.

Hmm. I wonder if this could be generalized more. With installing
Recommends by default it seems like there's been more talk recently
about looking at what dependencies are actually needed. I'm working on
another example, matplotlib, which is a nice python scientific
plotting library that requires 300+ packages (over 100MB download) to
install from a clean Ubuntu chroot.

Do you think generalization of the tag to something  like "heavy-deps"
would hurt your efforts with Java?

-Jordan