Bug#306800: jta: Please allow building with sun-j2sdk1.5 and recognize the JAVA_HOME directories used by java-package

Michael Koch Michael Koch <konqueror@gmx.de>, 306800@bugs.debian.org
Fri Apr 29 07:56:03 2005


On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 10:10:09AM +0300, Kalle Kivimaa wrote:
> Barry Hawkins <barry@bytemason.org> writes:
> > The JDKs are packaged by make-jpkg are non-free, and as such, we do n=
ot
> > tamper with the javac, java, etc. commands of any vendor's JRE/JDK.
> > People expect that sort of thing to be left the way the vendor made i=
t,
> > and currently (for better or worse) a java command from any of them d=
oes
> > not attempt to set JAVA_HOME or other environmental variables itself.
>=20
> Basically what I'm wondering is what should our Java packaging policy
> be related to packages requiring java2-compiler to build. Should they
> check for the existence of a non-free compiler which requires the
> JAVA_HOME or can they just assume the behaviour of say jikes? I think
> this should be consistent and documented in the policy so that both
> the maintainers and users are on the same page.
>=20
> Currently the situation is that I could blindly go and close the same
> bug against JSPWiki by simply saying that java2-compiler should not
> require any extra environment to work and if some non-free
> implementation does require that, it is not a problem of a free Debian
> package. I'm not entirely comfortable with that and that's why I would
> like it be consistently either JAVA_HOME supported or not.

The Debian Policy =A7 9.9 clearly says:

"A program must not depend on environment variables to get reasonable def=
aults."

Setting an environment variable in debian/rules for build is okay but no =
software
should depend on them during runtime. If it does we need to provide a wra=
pper.


Michael
--=20
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