Help the Java Team distribute your project!
On Wed 05 June 2019 with tags javaWritten by Hans-Christoph Steiner
There is a vast array of great free software projects written in Java. All sorts of large systems that we all rely on every day are built upon the Apache Foundation libraries. Large companies like Google and IBM put out standard libraries that so many other projects use. Unfortunately, the standard practice for distributing Java code makes it a lot of work to integrate them into Debian.
The Debian Java Team's work is generally under-appreciated, so we are getting the word out here. The Java Team has to consistently fight the Java standard practice of bundling all deps into a single JAR. This means there is no shared security updates, each dev has to update every dependency themselves in that model. That works great for large companies with staff devoted to doing that.
For the majority of Debian use cases, that works poorly. Debian
delivers on the promise that people can just apt install foo and
have it work, and receive security updates. The user does not even
need to know what language the program is written in, it just works.
The Java developer community need to embrace the value of these use cases, and help Debian by making it easier to package Java projects in the standard distro method, with shared dependencies that are independently updated.
Python and Ruby provide great examples of more flexible standard practice for shipping software. Both have methods of describing the dependencies needed, and then automatically fetching them. They are designed in a way that is quite easy to hook into the native build system and make Debian packages. That is sadly not the case with Gradle and Maven, the most popular build systems for Java. For those, the Java Team usually has to extensively patch the build system to make it work for the Debian package.
How you can help
There are many things that upstream projects can do to make it a lot easier to include them in Debian and other distros.
- Include a build target in your build system that builds using only libraries in Debian.
- Provide a minimal build target which uses as few build tricks as possible, like Gradle plugins or custom hacks.
- Run Continuous Integration (CI) builds against Debian/testing, its so easy these days with GitLab CI, Travis CI, etc.
- Help us package Java, and learn first hand!
For more information, you can see @apo's talk at FOSDEM. Questions are always welcome on debian-java@lists.debian.org and #debian-java.