I have been thinking recently, and I think I came up with a viable
solution for packaging this that use maven for building.

The first problem is that maven will attempt to download jar
dependencies from a remote repository. This can be avoided by calling
maven with -o, for offline mode.

This leads to the question of where, then, to get the jars from. I had
first thought at build time, we could populate a local repository with
symlinks to jars that we provide from packages. This would work, and
could be automated to some extent, but I think it would be tedious to
maintain a list of jars that each package needs. 

So, today I came up with the idea of maintaining a package, like maven-
repo or something, that basically installs a local repository populated
with every jar from the repository... except they would actually be
symlinks to the jars provided by a package. For example:

/usr/share/maven-repo/commons-validator/jars/commons-validator-1.0.2.jar
--> /usr/share/commons-validator/lib/commons-validator.jar

This package would need a good amount of maintenance though, but I still
think it would be the simplest way to provide a maven repository for
building packages.

The next thing would be an eclass to support maven-built packages, like
java-maven.eclass perhaps. This would add a dependency of the most up-
to-date version of maven-repo (~dev-java/maven-repo), and a wrapper for
maven to force offline mode and to use our local repo
at /usr/share/maven-repo/, ie:

emaven() {
	maven -Dmaven.repo.local=/usr/share/maven-repo -o "$@" || die "emaven
failed"
}

Additionally, it could do some sanity checks, by parsing the project.xml
and:
	make sure that all of its dependencies are in /usr/share/maven-repo
	make sure that the symlinks aren't broken, ie the package they point to
is installed
	make sure the packages used in maven-repo are in DEPEND/RDEPEND



Once we have this framework in place, then we can also begin getting
maven built from source.


Regards,

Josh

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