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!!!

Next generation :)

Can we retire when we see next generation picking up our work?

Rpm distros unite (at least their Java stacks)

As an Eclipse developer I'm really proud to say that Eclipse happens to be the driving force for improving the Java stack in various Linux RPM distros. Kudos to all Eclipse developers for making the platform that happens to be the single Java based application that Linux packagers are willing to spend time getting it shipped with their distro!!!

Eclipse dependencies are build using the two most popular Java build systems - Ant and Maven. And that's how the whole work on getting their latest versions packaged to work properly on Fedora. A number of other people joined the effort and we wouldn't have made it without their great help. So what we have now is Maven 3.0.3 on the upstream release date (thanks to the hard work done by Stanislav Ochotnický) - hey this is the first time EVER! Mageia and openSUSE are also working hard to get their stacks updated to the state of Fedora one.

Cross-distros collaboration happens in the best possible way - dev-to-dev directly on #fedora-java or #eclipse-linux at irc.freenode.org . Let me put a small cite to show it:

[08:33] <akurtakov> sshaw: did you fix the icu4j
[08:34] <sshaw> akurtakov: yeah
[08:34] <sshaw> well dmorgan did
[08:34] <sshaw> he finished it up for me when I fell asleep
[08:34] <sshaw> akurtakov: with + sed -i -e 's|tomcat5-jsp-2.0-api|tomcat6-jsp-2.1-api|g' dependencies.properties
[08:34] <sshaw> can I drop tomcat 5?
[08:34] <akurtakov> heh, crossdistro collaboration to the rescue
[08:34] <sshaw> akurtakov: rpm distros unite

Disclaimer:

• Fedora - akurtakov - Alexander Kurtakov
• openSUSE - sshaw - Stephen Shaw
• Mageia - dmorgan - Dexter Morgan

As I have started with Eclipse and it's role - Mageia already has Eclipse and OpenSuse is really close to getting it packaged. All of this is of course based on the Eclipse Linux Tools eclipse-build project (there is Debian and Ubuntu helping there) but the RPM distros have gone one step further - even the RPM specfile is kind of a shared one.

When Andrew Overholt pointed me into starting eclipse-build I have never thought that this project will happen to be a hub for real cross-distro collaboration bigger than it's Eclipse influence. There are a number of other nice chats/ideas for collaboration that happened thanks to the personal talks that started around eclipse-build. Thanks to Niels Thykier who told us about Debian work for creating Java webapps packaging guidelines and helper tools this was brought to Fedora Java SIG meetings for discussion. There is no fruit from this discussion yet but at least we are trying to be aware of each other's work so we(all Linux distros) can come with a single position that can influence upstream Java developers - note that they are not mandatory Linux developers so they are not aware of our problems.

Collaboration is not something that can be pushed to people top-down in the FOSS world, it depends on every single contributor to make it happen bottom-up. And it is already happening you have to just join us.

Announcement: Eclipse Linux Tools 0.7 release

I'm especially happy to announce the Eclipse Linux Tools 0.7 release.

You can download it here (Fedora packages will be pushed together with the Eclipse Helios SR2 release at the end of this month or early next one).

Read the New&Noteworthy or use the wiki to read all the documentation. For the first time all our documetation is consolidated in a single place. Everyone is more than welcome in helping us improve it - just edit the wiki page and we will fetch it for the next release.

Going to Brno this weekend

I'm heading to Brno tomorrow for DeveloperConference2011.

If someone wants to have a chat about the Java stack in Fedora, anything Eclipse related or wants to see Eclipse Fedorapackager in action and make it part of his/her workflow just drop me a mail and we will find when and where to do it.
In addition to the conference days Thursday and Sunday are fine too.

Announcement: Maven 3 lands in Fedora

Maven 3 is in Fedora for some time but no package was using it to build.

Things are changing we have the very first package using it to build in Fedora approved. Thus we consider it ready for general usage.

Everyone please try using maven instead of maven2 package.

All you need to do is change mvn-jpp to mvn-local and switching parameters having maven2 in their names to just maven e.g. -Dmaven2.jpp.depmap.file becomes -Dmaven.jpp.depmap.file.

We are looking for your bug reports or even better success stories. Let's make Fedora 15 rock for Maven users and let's hope that we will be able to kill Maven 2.x not later than Fedora 16.

Getting started with a source rpm downloaded from the net is even easier now

Eclipse Specfile Editor has been able to import source rpms for ages. But there was a small inconvenience - it was working only for local files. Not any more.

Give the import wizard your URL and watch it downloading the src.rpm file and setting up a project for you.

How much easier you want it to be to start doing Fedora revews. Try it now from our nightly build site and help us reduce the pending package reviews in Fedora.