Re: Guidance for packaging Java programs

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 13 juillet 2023 21:35:37 GMT+02:00, Bruno Victal <mirai@makinata.eu> a écrit :
>Hi Julien,
>
>On 2023-07-13 18:48, Julien Lepiller wrote:
>> I've never seen anything like saxon-he sources. It looks like a bunch of zip files that contain java files with no build system. The ant-build-system might be able to build that, though no idea how much dependencies there could be.
>
>It looks like the Saxon-HE sources are actually “generated” from this repository:
><https://saxonica.plan.io/projects/saxonmirrorhe/repository>

I see. We have two problems it seems: it uses gradle, for which there's no build system, and it also requires an older version of itself for some preprocessing. Might get tricky…

>
>> If you feel like helping, maybe an importer would be a good first step :). You should be able to get info from Maven Central (get the pom files, they are XML files and we have a module somewhere to handle them (guix build maven pom) I think). It should work for maven and gradle packages at least. Mapping maven name to guix names might also be challenging, but we can solve with an upstream-name property.[…]
>
>> To summarize, the main pain points are: lots of dependencies that can quickly go out of hand, source buildability is not great, as many ship their own versions of their dependencies (we need to snippet pre-built jars away, and find a workaround when the build fails to find them), and bootstrappability, as there can be quite a lot of dependency circles.
>
>I wonder if this is doable for the java uninitiated.
>(Why bother with Java when you can write in Guile? :D)
>An importer first would certainly be a step in the right direction, yes.
>(handcrafting package definitions for dependencies and dependencies of
>said dependencies is no fun)

Well, I don't write a lot of Java either :)