<Swing Dev> Request for review: Bug 100054: Make building the Nimbus look 'n' feel optional

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/5/15 Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
>> The irony here is that yesterday I updated my laptop to Ubuntu 9.04, and
>> (a) the Mercurial package does not completely install correctly
>> (b) even if it did, it is version 1.1.2.something, and OpenJDK requires
>>     0.9.5.
>> The point being that if people need version X of something they will
>> download and use it one way or another.
>
> Point taken.   :-)
>
> However, distros are all built on the build farms, and packages can only
> use dependencies that are actually part of the distro.  Therefore,
> packagers don't install packages outside the distro in their test
> buildroots, as it would only mean a failure when pushed to the build farm.
>

This is exactly my concern, given I'm tackling how to package this up
for people using IcedTea7, who in many cases will be using it to
create packages of the JavaOne preview for the distros.  A quick
survey of some of the most popular distros showed that:

* Fedora doesn't yet package JIBX at all
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462923)
* Debian only includes an older version 1.0.1 and in the stable
version it's in 'contrib' which isn't turned on by default.  This is
presumably an artefact of it previously only building with the
proprietary Sun JDK
(http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=jibx&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all)
* Ubuntu, as it follows Debian, has the same 1.0.1 version of JIBX in
hardy and intrepid.  Again it's in 'multiverse', their equivalent of
'contrib' I believe.  A newer version is in Jaunty but I think this is
too new (1.1.6)
(http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=jibx&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all)
* Gentoo has JIBX 1.1.5 and that's the version I've been able to build
against.  Interestingly, the first reaction when I mentioned this to
the Gentoo Java devs. was that the low version was a bug and I wanted
it bumped to 1.2...

In summary, things don't look that good.

> Andrew.
>
>
>> On May 15, 2009, at 6:39 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
>>
>>> Peter Zhelezniakov wrote:
>>>> Andrew Haley wrote:
>>>>> We are not in a position to dictate to a user exactly which version of
>>>>> JIBX will be installed on their system.  Therefore, if JIBX is now a
>>>>> dependency of OpenJDK we'll have to find a way to make OpenJDK work
>>>>> with whatever versions of JIBX people choose.
>>>>
>>>> To make it clear: JIBX is not a runtime dependency. It is used at build
>>>> time only.
>>>>
>>>> OpenJDK does work regardless of JIBX presence.
>>>
>>> Sure, thanks for clarifying, but it makes no difference to the real
>>> situation: we are not in a position to dictate to someone building
>>> OpenJDK exactly which version of JIBX will be installed on their system.
>>> The build systems used by distros aren't guaranteed to have exactly
>>> Version X of JIBX.
>>>
>>> Andrew.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>



-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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