Appropriateness for inclusion in MacPorts

[Blair Zajac]

> On Sep 12, 2017, at 5:28 AM, Rainer Müller <raimue at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 2017-09-04 14:46, Aaron Madlon-Kay wrote:
>> 1. Some OSS Java applications
>> 
>> There are some Java applications I use that have both GUI and CLI components. One of them is bundled by default with a JRE. A trivial port would basically just download a .zip and dump the contents in /Applications/MacPorts, and make a symlink or two in $PREFIX/bin. On the other hand they could be built from source via Maven or Gradle, but I’ve never seen a port like that.
>> 
>> Several Java-based ports I am aware of are Ant, Maven, Gradle, Jython… these all basically just download binaries and maybe make some symlinks, but they are Serious CLI Dev Tools™, so maybe that’s OK for them.
> 
> As Java applications are mostly self-contained without external
> dependencies (no dynamically linked libraries), I guess the approach to
> just extract the .zip will work.
> 
> However, I do not know what kind of compatibility we can expect from the
> bytecode.

I prefer to download precompiled Java packages now. For example, commons-collections doesn’t compile with JDK 8 and for the most part, we have only a single JDK version installed on our Macs at any one time. Also, I’m not aware of that much patching of the Java sources.

Blair