More Java guidelines questions

[Andrew Haley]

Jerry James wrote:
> I've just been looking at bug 262401 [1] to see what I need to do to
> update it to the new Java packaging guidelines.  I have 2 new
> questions about the guidelines.
> 
> First, the guidelines say that I must both Requires and Build-Requires
> jpackage-utils.  This bit of code needs nothing in jpackage-utils that
> I can discern.  It has no external dependencies, doesn't ship with any
> binary blobs, etc.  The guidelines say must, so I'll do it, but what
> is the rationale?
> 
> Second, the GCJ guidelines say, "For Fedora versions < 8, no JDK was
> available other than GCJ so GCJ AOT bits MUST be present."  This
> presents a problem for the package in question, because it consists of
> annotations only.  They are Java 1.5 annotations, so the GCJ in F7 can
> produce the needed class files.  But there is no actual code to
> compile, so there is nothing for the GCJ AOT bits to do.  Can an
> exception be granted to annotation-only packages (not that there are
> likely to be many of those)?

Amazing -- I never even imagined that such a thing as an annotation-only
package might exist!  The guidelines are intended to allow reasonable
people to interpret them sensibly.  In this case, AOT-compiling wouldn't
hurt but wouldn't be of much benefit, so I don't think it matters.

Andrew.