Hi. I've gotten motivated again to close Processing's ITP bug #433270, since Processing has gone out of beta recently, and OpenJDK seems to be able to handle it now.
There are a few problems. One, there is no upstream tarball. There is a tagged svn release, but it includes a lot of superfluous software, such as Sun's non-free JRE (OpenJDK seems to work fine now), and build environments for Windows and MacOS X. Also, it has the wrong permissions on many files, e.g. executable permissions on README and so on. Although I can easily bundle all of this into a proper tarball, how should I reflect this rebundling in my packaging? Build it into debian/rules? Two, the upstream source uses a very strange build system. Basically, they wrote their own Perl and shell scripts that do the building. I am naïvely thinking that I might be able to patch it to use CMake, or maybe Apache Ant since it's a Java project. But supposing that turns out to be a difficult project, should the upstream build system bother me too much? It appears to put all of the build files into one directory, so at least it seems to clean the build: just delete the build directory. Three, and here my Java ignorance begins to show, I see that the upstream source also includes some .jar for which I am not sure I can find the corresponding source. How can I gather more information about .jars and see if I'm just mistaken as to where the source might be? I know it's just a zip file, but I thought there are tools to manipulate and gather information from .jar files? Thank you, - Jordi G. H.
