[gentoo-dev] Summary for Java team meeting

[Krzysiek Pawlik]

Yesterday (9 September, 20:00 CEST, 14:00 EST), the Java team held a meeting,
The agenda for the meeting is available at [1]. This summary follows the format
of the agenda.

1. Personel updates

 First task was to aquire information about active developers who work with Java
 related ebuilds, it produced following list:

  * betelgeuse (Petteri Räty)
  * caster (Vlastimil Babka)
  * gurligebis (Bjarke Istrup Pedersen)
  * nelchael (Krzysiek Pawlik)
  * nichoj (Joshua Nichols)
  * sanchan (Sandro Bonazzola)
  * wltjr (William Thomson)

 More details about areas of responsibility are available in meeting notes [2].

 Missing developers:

  * compnerd (Saleem Abdulrasool)
  * karltk (Karl Trygve Kalleberg)
  * zx (Chris Aniszczyk)

 Second task was to establish a list of developers along with architectures with
 which they can work:

  * alpha - no support for Java
  * amd64 - nichoj, sanchan
  * arm - no support for Java
  * hppa - no support for Java
  * ia64 - nichoj
  * m68k - no support for Java
  * mips - no support for Java
  * ppc - nelchael, nichoj
  * ppc-macos - no support for Java
  * ppc64 - nichoj
  * s390 - no support for Java
  * sh - no support for Java
  * sparc - no support for Java
  * x86 - all Java team developers
  * x86-fbsd - gurligebis

 It was decided to drop support for dev-java/compaq-jdk and dev-java/compaq-jre
 on alpha - those two packages don't work as expected and are not supported by
 upstream. Sparc and alpha wait for fully working free Java JDK/JRE (kaffe, gcj
 and gnu-classpath for example).

2. Migration to the new Java system

 It was decided that no new features will be added to 'core' Java packages to
 allow proper testing and bug fixing. We are targeting 14 October for
 stabilizing core packages, list of core packages is available at [3] under
 "Code Listing 2.1: package.keywords". There was also talk about what features
 are planned to make their way into java-config before feature freeze, for
 example --tools option to get location for tools.jar from currently selected
 VM.

 Current status of migration (list of not migrated ebuilds, progress graph) is
 available at [4] along with 'current' state at [5].

3. Feature requests

 Only one point made it's way into "Feature requests": virtuals for several Java
 packages: javamail, jaf and others. To better understand the problem lets take
 a look at packages that could provide virtual/javamail:

  * dev-java/sun-javamail-bin
  * dev-java/gnu-javamail
  * dev-java/sun-javamail (currently in Java overlay [6])

 Same situation is with JAF (JavaBeans Activation Framework). Decision about
 virtuals was postponed as minor issue, since it can wait until after the new
 Java system is stablized.

4. Documentation

 It was decided that the Java Upgrade Guide [3] needs to be updated and it needs
 to list possible upgrade paths. Additionally following documents need work:

  * Tomcat Guide [7]
  * Resin Guide (not published yet) [8]
  * Common Problems [9]
  * How to be a good upstream [10]

 Following documents need to be created:

  * How to be a good downstream - document decribing best practices about
    handling Java
  * Guide to using maven in ebuilds - this document is currently blocked by not
    complete maven ebuilds (see 'Future plans')

 We are also looking for articles that cover Java support on Gentoo

5. QA / static analysis tools

 Using die after eant in ebuilds has been deprecated: eant dies on it's own, so:

  eant ... || die "eant failed"

 should be changed just to:

  eant ...

 New checks for usage of old eclasses and other QA issued are pending inclusion
 in repoman. Additionaly pcheck will probably be implemented as repoman modules
 after repoman gains ability to use such modules, not as separate tool. Eclipse
 plugin for writing ebuilds (and performing QA checks) was started by zx, but is
 currently unreleased. Gentoo user benny^work was also interested in such
 plugin, but current state of this effort is unknown. Developer wltjr suggested
 making such plugin also for Netbeans. One possible way of creating such plugin
 (aside from implementing syntax highlighting) is to use Jython to use checks
 from repoman.

6. Future plans

 One controversial step, split of dev-java into more smaller categories, was
 postponed for now. It will be reconsidered after stabilizing new Java build
 system.

 Additional third quiz will be required for new developers that want to join
 Java team due to specifics of Java builds. Such quiz would have few general
 questions about Java, handling classpath and ant builds.

 State of maven on Gentoo was given by nelchael, and is available in attached
 log. We are currently waiting for 2.0.5 release of maven to build it from
 source and allow ebuilds to use it to build other software. For now it is
 required to use `mvn ant:ant` to obtain build.xml file for ant, which can be
 used in ebuilds.

 Last two points of agenda: Java 1.6 and Java 1.7 were discussed. There was talk
 about how to prepare for upcoming release of Java 1.6 in October (that date is
 not fixed - it may change), troubles with JDBC drivers as Java 1.6 introduces
 new functions, which breaks compilation of current JDBC3 drivers. Testing of
 Java 1.7 has been postponed until 1.6 comes out.

7. Not on agenda

 Following topics were mentioned that were not on agenda:

  * Estimated EOL (end of life) for generation 1: until all ebuilds are
    migrated to generation 2 and stabilized we have to keep generation 1 alive
    in tree
  * packages that break due to generation 2:
    * dev-java/jarjar
    * dev-libs/cyrus-sasl
    * kde-base/kdejava
    * kde-base/qtjava
    * app-accessibility/gnome-speech
    That list is probably not complete.
  * contacting David Herron (Sun employee, who helped to bring DLJ [11] licensed
    Sun JDK to potage) about packaging and distribution of other Sun Java
    packages, for example Sun JWSDP [12], JAF, Javamail

[ 1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/September_2006_Meeting_Outline
[ 2] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/September_2006_Meeting_Notes
[ 3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/java-upgrade.xml
[ 4] http://dev.gentoo.org/~nelchael/java-generation-2/
[ 5] http://dev.gentoo.org/~nelchael/java-generation-2/not-migrated-current
[ 6] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/
[ 7] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/tomcat-guide.xml
[ 8] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/docs/resin-guide.xml
[ 9] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/Common_Problems
[10] http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/How_to_be_a_good_upstream
[11] https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/developer.html
[12] http://java.sun.com/webservices/jwsdp/

-- 
Krzysiek Pawlik   <nelchael at gentoo.org>   key id: 0xBC555551
desktop-misc, x86, java, apache, ppc...