recommends of -gcj packages

[Matthias Klose]

something which comes up in meetings of the java team from time to time.
currently many java libraries and some java apps do build an additional -gcj
package, which contains the binary code (the java byte code compiled to native
code). This speeds up the gij runtime a lot (or some people may say: makes the
gij runtime usable). The -gcj packages are usually recommended by the package
containing the java byte code. With the recent move to openjdk-6/cacao-oj6 as
the preferred java runtime, people start complaining about this recommendation.
IMO these recommendations should still be kept. Reducing these to suggestions
doesn't install them by default, and users of gij do get poor performance (and
worse performance on platforms where openjdk doesn't provide a JIT compiler
yet). A recommendation of 'bsh-gcj' maybe could be replaced with something like
'bsh-gcj | openjdk-jre [amd64 i386 lpia] | cacao-oj6 [powerpc]', or by
introducing a virtual package 'jre-jit-compiler' and recommending 'bsh-gcj |
jre-jit-compiler'. However both solutions still don't address the case for
having more than one runtime installed. For intrepid I would like to see the
recommends unchanged. Can our tools handle all recommends with names ending in
'-gcj' explicitely and not including those on the CD sets?

  Matthias