Hello Geertjan, Am 02.11.19 um 11:59 schrieb Geertjan Wielenga: > Hi Markus, > > Great work, you appear to be making releases of NetBeans available on > Debian, with patches: > > https://sources.debian.org/src/netbeans/10.0-3/debian/patches/ > > How are you doing this, are you keeping track of the latest releases -- > we have just released 11.2. > > Here are the distros that appear to be on Debian: > > https://sources.debian.org/src/netbeans/ > > Also, what's the reason for the patches, is the end result still clearly > NetBeans with all its features -- what has been modified and can it be > truly called "NetBeans" still? > > Thanks, > > Gj
Netbeans is currently only available in Debian unstable and oldstable. The oldstable version is based on Netbeans 8.1 and works fine with Java 8. We always have only supported the base version of Netbeans because it is nearly impossible to maintain all features of Netbeans for Debian. The version in unstable is based on Netbeans 10.0 and is not part of Debian stable because even the base version has some serious flaws that makes it unsuitable for a stable release. [1] Thanks to the help of Jaroslav Tulach and Jan Lahoda I could make some progress and I believe Ubuntu has a patch to fix the most serious problem but still packaging new releases of Netbeans requires too much time which I would like to spend on other Debian packages instead. There are mainly two reasons for the patches, the build system and Debian's requirement to build packages only with system libraries. In Debian all build-dependencies must be available as separate packages which are all built from source and comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That means in order to build Netbeans we can't rely on your build system which downloads hundreds of prebuilt binaries from the internet. For instance in order to package Netbeans for Debian we also have to package javaewah, jaxb, jgit, svnkit, Ant, Maven, etc. The second requirement is that we have only one version of a certain Java library because of security support. We don't provide multiple different versions of an Apache Commons library for example which helps us to fix security vulnerabilities quickly because we only have to patch one package instead of dozens. So whenever another project which is also packaged in Debian requires a newer/older release of a certain library but Netbeans still build-depends on an older/newer version of the same library build failures or runtime errors may occur and this requires a patch. The most likely scenario for the future is that Netbeans will be removed from Debian unless more people start to contribute. We will still keep the Netbeans Platform package because it is easier to maintain and also needed to build VisualVM for example. Regards, Markus [1] https://bugs.debian.org/925509
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