Re: Guidance for packaging Java programs

[Julien Lepiller]

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 :)