Maven and RPM - one problem less

Are you packaging Java software?

Does your package use Maven as a build system?

Have you wondered what package provides certain Maven artifact?

If you answered yes to at least one of the questions there is a good news for you:

Fedora's build system is going to automatically generate RPM Provides in a sensible way for Maven developers.

Now the details. Big thanks goes to the RPM developers for the new Dependency Generator which has made our work so much easier.

With just these 2 simple files maven.attr and maven.provwe get it to the state where every package that installs pom files according to Fedora Java Packaging Guidelineswill get provides added for every pom installed in the form mvn(groupId:artifactId)where groupId and artifactId are the same things you know from your Maven experience. Look at this recent maven2 rebuildfor example what will be generated for a package with many pom files installed.

It might look a small thing but I'm really looking for the day when I'll be able to write BuildRequires: mvn(org.apache.maven:maven-script-ant) and not having to guess whether this is part of maven package or maven-plugin-tools-ant or maven-shared-ant. And these days are near for rawhide when we get the critical mass of rebuilds done so the provides are in place.

This opens an enourmous opportunity for improving a number of things like:

* when you get a build failure in your maven build - you should be able to just write yum install mvn(groupId:artifactId) and have the package ready. Who knows we might even find someone to create a PackageKit extension in the way bash command-not-found is acting?

* tools like RPMStubby will be able to generate proper BuildRequires section without guessing how did the distribution renamed the package

* use your imagination

There is a possibility to add similar support for the requires generation but lets first do all the fixes/simplification this one gives us.

Happy packaging to all Java and Maven packagers!!!