Building Java ports from sources or not ?

[Herve Quiroz]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 10:43:01AM -0700, Greg Lewis wrote:
> I think it would be useful to have a general policy so that new porters
> can know which they should try and do.  This doesn't mean all ports have
> to go one way or the other, but as much consistency as possible is good.

I agree. In fact I was looking for this when asking. This kind of
"agreed recommended policy" and all the stuff in bsd.java.mk for Java
ports should be part of an "official document" regarding Java ports.
Probably part of the FreeBSD distribution...

Any volunteer ? ;)

I need to browse the mailing list archive but IIRC someone told us he was
quite interested in contributing to freebsd-java but he said he was not
skilled enough for low-level development. Maybe this is a good chance
for him.

We don't need to start from scratch here. Basically we could start by
using the various HTML pieces already available (Ernst's webpages[1] for
example).

> Question.  Does anyone know what NetBSD, OpenBSD or Gentoo Linux do for
> Java ports and whether they have a policy on this?

Just a quick look at www.gentoo.org and here is what I found:

http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/dev-java/commons-cli/commons-cli-1.0-r2.ebuild?rev=1.5&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

--> jakarta-commons-cli is built from source.

Here most of the other Java ebuilds (Gentoo ports) are built from
source. In fact I didn't find any ebuild that is a binary one. Except
maybe dom4j but I can't tell because the dom4j distribution includes
everything needed to build it (even ant and junit) so even the fact that
the build tools are not amongst the build dependencies does not
necessarily mean that is a binary ebuild.

I don't know for NetBSD nor OpenBSD... I will take a look at it tomorrow
unless someone else answers before.

Regards,

Herve


[1] http://people.freeebsd.org/~znerd