[jbosstools-dev] Packaging JBoss Tools for Fedora (issue & potential patches)

[Gerard Ryan]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hi,

For the past while I've been working on packaging JBoss Tools for
Fedora as part of my GSOC project (Fedora JBoss Spin)[0]. I've just
run into a slight problem, and I'm trying to look for the
cleanest/easiest way to work around it. I'm hoping that there might be
someone on this list who can provide some further insight or advice! :)

First, a little background on the problem. As you can imagine, for
Fedora, we've got a lot of rules and regulations on how stuff can be
packaged. One of these is that any bundled libraries or precompiled
code must be removed before building, and where necessary/possible, a
package is created for each library that is removed so that the
process for the original software that was being built can continue.
Another rule that we have is that only the latest version of stuff can
be packaged, so that everything can be maintained as cleanly as possible.

The part of JBoss Tools that's causing a spot of trouble with these
rules so far is the org.jboss.ide.eclipse.archives.core bundle. In the
lib/ directory of this, there are some quite old jars, with truezip
and jbossxb (jboss-xml-binding.jar) being the most prominent of these,
and the others seeminly being dependencies for these. I've managed to
package the latest truezip release (7.5.5, as opposed to the bundled
6.6), and I've patched the code of the archives.core plugin to make it
work. I hope that these changes can be checked and integrated by you
guys at some stage! :)

The jbossxb dependency has proved somewhat more troublesome. The
bundled version is a bit old (2.0.0.CR6), and has a different set of
dependencies than the most recent release[1] (2.0.3.GA from 2010). I
had managed to get over that hurdle temporarily, and the more recent
release seemed to work. The problem occured when jbossxb and its
dependencies were being reviewed for inclusion into the Fedora
repositories, and the reviewer noticed that one of the dependencies
for that (jboss-reflect), bundles its own forked version of another
library (objectweb-asm), that isn't fully compatible with the upstream
version. This is also not allowed in Fedora.

Since this problem child (jboss-reflect) seems to be obselete and
forgotten about (I can only find it as a subproject of AS6[2]), I
don't necessarily want to package it for Fedora unless it's absolutely
necessary.

You're probably wondering why I'm talking to you on jbosstools-dev ML
about this? My query is, how essential is this jbossxb dependency for
org.jboss.ide.eclipse.archives.core? Is there any way that it could be
avoided, or are there any drop-in replacements that we could try
instead? Have you got any other suggestions that I could try?

Also, if you are interested in trying the most recent development
version of the Fedora JBoss Spin, you can find more info on it here[3]
and run it as a live usb image or in a vm.

thanks for reading,
Gerard.

[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora-JBoss-Spin
[1] https://source.jboss.org/changelog/JBossCommon/jbossxb/trunk
[2] http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbossas/projects/jboss-reflect/
[3] https://blog.grdryn.me/2012/07/09/fedora-jboss-spin-gsoc-update-7


- -- 
Gerard Ryan :: gerard at ryan.lt :: http://blog.grdryn.me :: @grdryn
PGP Fingerprint: AA11 A666 C98E B6D8 231C 11ED 6EDC 7E4A 62BC 4A15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
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=W+BK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----