[IdPv3] Packaging Java code for Linux Package Managers

[Russ Allbery]

I think Chad's proposal sounds perfectly reasonable for Debian packages
distributed by the project.

Peter Schober <peter.schober at univie.ac.at> writes:
> * Chad La Joie <lajoie at itumi.biz> [2011-11-03 12:38]:

>> Second, the unit of management within Java (at least for our webapps)
>> is the WAR, which includes libraries (which presumably would be
>> expected to go in to /usr/lib somewhere) as well as various other files
>> (e.g., images, text files like CSSs, conf files like web.xml).  Those
>> other things really shouldn't go in the /usr/lib directory but do need
>> to be in the same directory structure as the libs in order to be
>> deployed.  In short, the Java environment makes assumption that are
>> different than the ones the Linux environment makes.

> Waiting for Russ to comment, since he authored
> http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep7/
> last year.
> I also faintly recall Quanah (and possibly later on Russ, leading to
> the above proposal?) trying to package the Shib IdP for Debian.

> Either way, I doubt getting the IdP in shape according to the
> distribution policies is possible with reasonable resources.

Yes, I would actively encourage Chad to not attempt to do something more
comprehensive, such as attempting to get the packages to satisfy the full
Debian packaging standards, because I don't think that's a productive use
of Chad's time.  That's something that needs the dedicated attention of a
packaging expert within the distribution packaging teams, and a lot of
work developing standards and methods for handling packaging Java web
applications (since none of the distributions have good policies for this
now).

I continue to hope to eventually make time to do at least part of this,
but we're talking about something that will be a multi-year effort, and
most of the work will have nothing at all to do with Shibboleth per se.
It will be in packaging various dependency Java libraries, figuring out
how to use Maven within the package build system, mapping Java's method of
handling dependencies to the operating system's methods, and other sorts
of work that's really more policy work within the distribution than it is
related to Shibboleth.

I'd rather have Chad working on Shibboleth than on all that stuff.  :)

In the meantime, having distribution packages that don't do things
"properly" but which achieve the core goal of providing a package that can
be installed and upgraded to keep the software up to date would be
excellent, and I'm happy to help out as much as I have the time with the
preparation of such "unofficial" (from the Debian perspective, not from
the Shibboleth perspective!) packages.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>