I'd like to start a discussion on building Java RPMs for OpenPKG.
Specifically, I need to create RPMs for the jakarta tools. The two
models to go from are the jakarta-originated RPMS and a tomcat RPM. (If
anyone has pointers to how other people are building Java RPMs I'd love
to hear about them.)
Essentially, building something like tomcat is a dependency hell, but
definitely solvable using the features of RPM. The challenge is that
the docs can be somewhat outdated for what various Java JARs are needed
and/or which version of the JDK provides them (e.g. JNDI comes with
JDK1.4, but the tomcat instructions say to download the JNDI
implementation).
What I'd really like to discuss is the installation location of these
files. If a JAR can be likened to a shared library, then doesn't it
make sense to have an equivalent 'lib' directory for these? Some
package creators dump JAR files under %{prefix}/share/java, which,
though platform neutral (and hence under 'share') are still libraries.
OpenPKG takes a different approach (with tomcat anyway) by putting stuff
under %{l_prefix}/libexec/tomcat. Which is better? I certainly like
devoting packages to their own directory structure, but this quickly
becomes unwieldly for library dependencies, hence the inevitability of a
/lib directory.
I think it could be rationalized to treat Java packages like traditional
GNU packages; putting stuff into /bin, /etc, /lib, and so forth.
However, I've never seen mention of this in the Linux FHS, but perhaps
I've missed it.
Of course we could have /lib/java, but that would seem to be reserved
for libraries just for the JDK (though, they're totally separate). And
then tools like Perl do things totally different as well, with perl
modules under a separate Perl tree.
In any case, I'm leaning towards the /bin,/etc,/lib structure, but the
openpkg tomcat RPM is set up differently, and I thought I'd canvass the
OpenPKG developers.
Best regards,
Garrett Conaty
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