Packaging large Java software stacks ?

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:10 AM, Thierry Carrez
<thierry.carrez at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> JBoss 4.2 has a much cleaner dependency approach (builds with ant,
> relatively small number of deps, no =VERSION dep). It's actually
> packaged in jaunty[1] so it works with our stack :) You could compare
> its clean dependency approach to Tomcat.
>
> So the solution for us might be to continue to do the same, package from
> source the sane upstream works (Tomcat, JBoss), do the
> big-binary-tarball approach for those we need but that can't build/run
> from our stack (Glassfish, Geronimo) and, when we can, encourage them to
> have a cleaner dependency approach.
>
> There are a few lessons to learn from RedHat/Fedora approach to Java
> packaging though. They have been leading/integrating the JPackage
> project[2], which is a nice attempt to provide a consistent RPM-based
> platform of Java libraries. They provide a single version of each JAR
> and work hard to patch everything to work with them... or they just
> leave the unfriendly software out of JPackage.

Thierry-

As with all of your messages in this thread, thanks for a concise,
informative summary.

I should also mention one more thing to this list...  And that's the
size of the effort at Red Hat, and within the community.  RH employs a
throng of JBoss developers, and the Java community within Fedora seems
healthy.

:-Dustin