Re: JPackage 6 on RHEL/CentOS 6

Hi David,

David Walluck wrote:
> This situation has not seemed to improve all that much in RHEL 7 either
> (since either the packages aren't being updated or the lack of proper
> maven support is being carried along).

This really makes me very sad. If RHEL is the number one Linux distribution 
for enterprises why is it not possible to successfully host enterprise 
level apps like Java web apps out-of-the-box?

>> Error: Package: eclipse-svnkit-1.3.0-3.el6.x86_64
>>              Requires: svnkit = 1.3.0
>>              Removing: svnkit-1.3.0-3.el6.x86_64
>>              Updated By: svnkit-1.3.5-2.jpp6.noarch (jpackage)
>>                  svnkit = 1.3.5-2.jpp6

> I would have thought that yum should be able to upgrade svnkit by
> removing eclipse-svnkit automatically. It's not the fault of JPP that
> eclipse-svnkit has such a hard version requirement (that is also quite old).

Of course. I assume that a requirement like svnkit >= 1.3.0 is always the 
best choice.

> JPP still uses CentOS 5.x internally, but even that is not so much help,
> as we do block several base packages in our yum (mock) configs.

Support for CentOS 4 ends in ~ 3 months and server hardware has aged. For 
me it's a natural choice to set up all new servers with CentOS 6 to get 
again a very long support period.

> At first I thought that this was going to be a complaint about JPP, but
> it really just seems to be a complaint about how bad RHEL 6 and RHEL 7
> Java support is.

Yes, you're right. This time it's more about RedHat Enterprise Linux. They 
should rename it back to RedHat Linux. :-)

But I'm also curious about the status of JPP. I use JPP5 on the CentOS 4 
machines for a long time now, but the repo is lacking updates for a lot of 
months now. So I just 'hoped' that new tomcats are released when a security 
hole was found, but honestly I don't know it for sure. Concerning the 
Sun/Oracle Java SDK I adapted the spec files myself. But the missing 
updates again are not satisfying me, especially as I can not upload 
anything of my work.

There should be a more easy to use solution for no-src RPMs. If it is not 
possible to offer a packaged version, there should be an easy to use script 
for setting up a local repo with all no-src RPMs. This script could e.g. 
include some wget calls to download the right versions.

For a lot of other libraries (Spring, slf4j, xerces, Hibernate) I started 
to switch to the original releases, since the RPMs where to old. In general 
I don't want to complain but point out some problems and offer help!

Could JPP benefit from moving to SourceForge? I'm hosting some projects 
there, so I know that their services are very complete and easy to use.
I'm not a great friend of forking, but what about a kind of reboot for the 
project?

Best regards,
	Boris