Bug#1000405: Please accept other JRE versions besides the default one

[tony mancill]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 06:14:16PM +0100, Olivier Cailloux wrote:
> Package: libbatik-java
> Version: 1:0.95.dfsg-5
> 
> The libbatik-java package currently recommends “default-jre”, itself
> depending on “default-jre-headless (= 2:1.11-72) [not hppa]”, itself
> depending on “openjdk-11-jre-headless [not hppa]”. But libbatik-java
> would work equally well with any posterior version, such as openjdk-17-
> jre-headless.
> 
> Please rather recommend “java-runtime-headless” if libbatik-java also
> works with java 8, or otherwise, consider some appropriate means to
> recommend any headless jre from 11 onwards.

Thank you for the bug report.  We might want to add a lintian check for
this condition, since it likely impacts a number of packages that depend
on a Java runtime.

In this specific case, we should create a separate binary package for
the wrappers that depends on a Java runtime, since it is technically
against Java Policy [1] for a library package to depend on a runtime.
That would also address bug #566901 [2].  Any thoughts on whether this
would be confusing to users?

In any event, I will update the Recommends with the next upload.

Regards,
tony

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/java-policy/ch02.html#policy-libraries
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=566901