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

[Max Rydahl Andersen]

Hi Gerard,

Sorry for being late to this thread, but been on 3 weeks vacation.

I see that you solved your original issue by being able to repackage the proper jbossxb
and thus be able to do a JBoss Tools 3.3.x without changing it too much - awesome!
(Rob also seem to have been able to handle this specific case better in 3.4.x so that's good)

Now that is done I would though like to take the chance to go over a few points in your email
which triggered my interest/curiosity since this issue is probably not going to be the only one you 
see while going through JBoss Tools codebase :)

> 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.

I understand the general idea of this but I wonder how this applies to tools which
actually bundles very specific jar's and might even bundle multiple versions of them to 
be able to support functionality/integration of older runtimes.

I'm curious on how Fedora packaging would/should handle this ?

> 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.

Yeah, but sometimes that is needed for compatibility with other things.
In this specific situation we can solve it but I can see cases where it 
becomes problematic and wondering how to handle it ?

> You're probably wondering why I'm talking to you on jbosstools-dev ML
> about this?

I'm actually amazed this is your first posting - all the issues you post about on http://blog.grdryn.me/
(I just learned about this recently) looks like perfect topics for this mailing list.

i.e. I really like to get JBoss Tools 3.3.x available under Fedora but since it looks to be not just a 
pure RPM wrapper, but an actual rebuild, with changes and more we really need to be sure 
its easy to see in the osgi version string this is *not* the "normal" JBoss Tools 3.3.x build.

Can you add Fedora or something at the end of the qualifier string to make it unique ?

This "rebuild" stuff also makes me wonder how Eclipse p2 is to be used with this version of Eclipse/JBoss Tools ?

i.e. SOA Tools users would need to use Eclipse p2 - what happens in this case  where JBoss Tools bundles
aren't the real JBoss Tools bundles ?

Should we tell users to uninstall the Fedora one (how?) and then install the real JBoss Tools if they want to do this ?

Another aspect is what to do with our JBoss Central feature - which also relies on eclipse p2 to install additional features.
Similar to how WTP server adapter wizard does, m2eclipse marketplace, mylyn etc. ...any ideas on how to handle these ?

> 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.

I need to try that :)

/max