Bug#547969: ivy jar not added to ant lib

[Michael Koch]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 09:25:21AM -0400, Patrick McFarland wrote:
> Basically, either allow Ivy to work by default with no additional
> changes, or don't bother packaging Ivy at all. People are going to get
> really confused when they apt-get install ivy and it doesn't work and
> there are no instructions
> included with the .deb to make it work.
> 
> People would not apt-get Ivy if they didn't want to use it.
> 
> Your same argument applies to ant itself, "But but but some projects
> include ant right inside of them, why have ant on the path install, it
> might conflict with theirs!"
> 
> Programs that include ant and/or ant rules to download Ivy do not
> effect Debian's packaging of Ant or Ivy in any realistic way.
> 
> My suggestion of a dpkg-configure option to install a symlink or not
> pleases both crowds and makes your argument entirely moot.

I'm a bit reluctant to just implement this debconf question for this.

I see no place in Debian where we recommend to just 'apt-get install'
java libraries and they will automatically get used. Even contents
of /usr/share/java ist not put on the CLASSPATH by default. There
are too many possible problems with this. Too many things can break
when wrong jars are on the CLASSPATH or jars are in the wrong order
on the CLASSPATH.

Do you have any really world example where Ivy is used inside Ant with
this setup? Having a good real world example where this is needed and
the example also works out-of-the-box with upstream ant releases would
be good hint to put Ivy into the Ant installation by default.

What would be possible would be an entry in README.Debian. Then the
local admin can do it if he wants to. And we can also clearly speak
about the possible implications of it.


Cheers,
Michael