Re: JPackage 6 on RHEL/CentOS 6

On 12/07/2011 04:57 AM, Boris Folgmann wrote:
> That is clear. But looking at jpackage.org the overall status of jpp6 is 
> unclear. As is jpp5, since it misses so much updates. The public 
> presentation of JPP needs to be improved. That's why I suggested a Wiki, as 
> this is easier to maintain as a web page. It could also benefit from 
> contributions of ordinary JPP users.

The distro getting updates right now is JPP-6, either generic or devel.
I admit that I have not been very consistent as to which one gets the
updated package. However, I do think that updates to a distro should
stop except for crucial bugfixes or security fixes Although we do not
guarnatee any kind of support, that is how all distros basically work.

In short, right now JPP-5 is basically frozen, and the only place you
will find new updates (upgrades) right now is in JPP-6 or later.

> Who is settings the goals? Where are they documented? Where do developers 
> communicate? I think I checked everything out besides the IRC channel.

There are not many people working on JPackage right now. You can find a
small amount of developers on #jpackage on FreeNode IRC.

That is the nature of open source, I suppose. One factor may be location
as you say (we used to use sourceforge many years ago).

At least a couple people who used to be developers now just use Fedora.
There is an ongoing attempt to have AS 7 in Fedora. The other factor in
Fedora has always been Eclipse, which JPP RPMS may actually break (due
to lack of OSGi support). But since Eclipse largely does not make use of
maven, I believe for now there is better maven support for each package
in JPackage as a whole. Yet, Fedora has a newer maven right now.
JPackage intends to support multiple versions of maven, but work in
ongoing. So, there are some advantages to Fedora, but Fedora has never
played nice with JPackage.

Finally, Red Hat seems to have largely switched to OpenJDK. This is what
JPackage is using for builds as well. There has been no need to build a
nosrc.rpm for a while now, assuming you're willing to give up the Oracle
JDK for the OpenJDK in your base OS.