Danny Angus wrote:
>>There was a discussion about an enterprise distribution of jakarta and
>>other open-source java technologies some time back on this list that
>>resulted in starting "oed" project on SourceForge [which is pretty much
>>dead at the moment :-( ].
>
>
> Which may suggest that there's more to solving this problem than meets the
> eye..
You got it, this is one of the main reasons.
> I'm nervous about tackling it because I think that it would take a massive
> effort to gain the kind of acceptance it would need to be worthwhile..
> on the other hand.. how does RPM work? Personally I'm the impatient
> "configure-make-make install" guy mentioned in the README files ;-)
RPM is neat and extremly clean and easy way to maintain software. This
is what you get for all the tremendous work done by package creators. It
maintains a central repository of packages installed and their
dependencies. Unlike Windows registry it doesn't allow arbitrary garbage
written to repository (AFAIK), it just uses it for package tracking. All
you need to know as a user is a few switches to the RPM command:
rpm -i (install)
rpm -e (erase)
rpm -U (update)
rpm -V (verify)
Task of a package creator is harder. (Here is a link with detailed
information : http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ ). In short (in reality it is
rather hard) package creators need to get sources, convert
"configure-make-make install" into a special RPM spec for a target
platform, build it into RPM.
Implementing the same thing in Java should be easier. As with RPM there
are same 3 roles involved that need to be supported (user, developer,
packager). The goal is to make "user" tasks as easy as with RPM, while
making "packager" task much easier, bringing it down to creating a
simple XML spec. It helps that in Java, you don't need to compile
sources for different platforms. Getting a distribution that includes
JARs is enough. Also, I am pretty sure there is lots of sinergy with
Ant, so many things do not need to be implemented from scratch.
I've been holding this idea for a while since you won't find volunteers
to help unless you lead such an effort and get it at least to beta, and
I am very busy with Cayenne as it is right now. But I would happily
participate as a developer, provided someone would take a lead.
--
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- Andrei (a.k.a. Andrus) Adamchik
Home of Cayenne - O/R Persistence Framework
http://objectstyle.org/cayenne/
email: andrus-jk at objectstyle dot org
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