[fedora-java] Improving Fedora javadoc

[David Walluck]

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Gary Benson wrote:
> Circular dependencies cannot be avoided for Fedora as a whole because
> there are packages which depend upon themselves -- the kernel, gcc,
> rpm, etc.  This doesn't make any of those packages not free.

I agree with everything here. While gcc, the kernel, etc. may be special
cases, we may try to avoid circular dependencies with java packages at
least. It is not that hard. Most bootstrap packages exist in jpackage
already (and hopefully they don't use binary jars). Then a few packages
like java-gcj-compat and ant will need to be bootstraped. The biggest
problem is the lack of javadoc creation. If javadoc could be part of the
core, then a lot of bootstrap issues would go away.

Finally, by non-free I am referring to pre-built binary jars,
tecnhnically, only ones built with the Sun jdk (though this is only a
philosophical issue). Assuming they were built with ecj + libgcj, all
the practical issues would still apply.

> There's only a couple left in the Fedora JOnAS, but these require
> Maven and its 60-70 dependencies that are not yet in Fedora.  I'm
> swamped with the 80-90 packages I already maintain!  I should be
> getting help Real Soon Now, but until that happens we'll be stuck
> with the binary dependencies (and old package versions, and the
> other stuff I don't have time to fix).

All, the more reason for jpackage and FC not to diverge. As we know,
someone from Red Hat has been working on a free maven, so maybe the
update to jonas can eventually happen.

>>I believe xalan-j2 also has prebuilt jars in the build
> 
> 
> It does.

I don't believe they are required to build if you just avoid building
the docs (which requrie stylebook, I think). Actually, last time I tried
to build xalan at all on a free stack it failed, so I will have to look
at this again.

- --
Sincerely,

David Walluck
<david at zarb.org>
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