March 2007 Meeting Summary

On March the 10th, the Java team held a meeting.

References:

Present developers

  • betelgeuse (Petteri Räty)
  • caster (Vlastimil Babka)
  • fordfrog (Miroslav Šulc)
  • karltk (Karl Trygve Kalleberg)
  • nichoj (Joshua Nichols)
  • wltjr (William Thomson)

Present contributors

  • ali_bush (Alistair Bush)
  • kiorky

Absent

  • nelchael (Krzysiek Pawlik)

Announcements

  • Betelgeuse will take the lead and nichoj will be the secondary lead
  • There will be monthly meetings second Saturday of every month at 2000 GMT

Topics

Migration Progress

Remaining generation 1 packages are likely older packages no one is using. If upstream development has stalled and/or the package lacks a maintainer, is outdated, broken, or etc. It will be package.masked and eventually removed from tree. Then added to one of the overlays. Other packages which are still generation 1 should be migrated. No stats were presented at meeting time to gauge overall progress, or remaining generation 1 packages.

Changes in overlays

The change will happen on Saturday 24th March 2007 at 12:00 UTC.
In truth the changes happened on Sunday as the GWN wasn't out. There will be a few changes with the Java Projects overlays. Remaining generation 1, stale, and/or unmaintained packages will be moved to the junkyard (not to be used as overlay). Packages being maintained and in working condition, but not needed in the main tree, while still interesting to e.g. java developers (libraries without end-user app depending on them, superseded applications with dead upstream) will go in the readily available java-overlay (the only one of these available via layman). Packages being developed, which might be incomplete, broken, untested, unstable, or etc will go in the renewed java-experimental overlay. This setup will replace current java-experimental-overlay (this will initially be the junkyard) and migrated-java-experimental-overlay (this will initially be java-overlay but then some experimental stuff should be moved to java-experimental). GCJ overlay will remain without changes.

Summation of overlay changes

  • java-experimental-overlay will become junkyard and be removed from layman
  • migrated-java-experimental-overlay will become java-overlay and is available via layman
  • a new java-experimental directory will be created for work in progress

What this means for layman users

  • Users should use after the changes have happened: 
    layman -d java-experimental
layman -d java-migration-packages
layman -a java-overlay

Split ant stabilization progress

Split ant has gone well so far and is about ready for stabilization. Once adequate testing of split ant and Java IDEs (Eclipse and Netbeans) is complete, split ant should be clear for stabilization.

Java virtuals

Till portage has full support for virtuals, and likely even still used after that. A new eclass will be created for java virtuals, java-virtuals-2.eclass. Which at a minimum will be used to provide the following functions for virtual dependencies. Along with the logic involved to determine the installed package that has the jars for the virtual.

Possible Java virtual functions

  • java-virtual_jar-from etc

Topics for next Month

  • Maven
  • JDBC recap preparation for 1.6 stabilization
  • 1.6 stabilization
  • Virtuals progress