Bug#1007923: maven-*-helper JAR placement seems to contradict Java policy

[tony mancill]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 07:17:46PM +0300, Andrius Merkys wrote:
> Hi Alexandre,
> 
> On 2022-03-23 16:33, Alexandre Rossi wrote:
> > Seems to work:
> > 
> >   $ ls -la /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner*
> >   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     15 18 mars  18:20 /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner-2.26.jar -> htmlcleaner.jar
> >   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176219 18 mars  18:20 /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner.jar
> >   $ sudo dpkg -i oss/debian/davmail/libhtmlcleaner-java_2.26-1+fix+bad+jar+name+1_all.deb
> >   [...]
> >   $ ls -la /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner*
> >   -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 176219 23 mars  15:27 /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner-2.26.jar
> >   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     20 23 mars  15:27 /usr/share/java/htmlcleaner.jar -> htmlcleaner-2.26.jar
> 
> Many thanks for the proposed patch. It seems we need a decision now on
> which one is actually buggy: maven-debian-helper or java-policy. I would
> vote for upholding the java-policy if only the symlink placement switch
> does not break anything (neither reverse dependencies not the update
> mechanism). Having versionless symlinks parallels nicely lib*-dev shlib
> scheme and there might be situations where this is beneficial for Java
> too. Unluckily enough, there are >700 source packages now directly
> affected by this [1].
> 
> [1] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/bad-jar-name

Hello Andrius, hi Alexandre,

I can't speak to every reverse dependency, but I don't expect breakage
to occur with this change, assuming of course that the update mechanism
works consistently.  I also agree with you that a versionless symlink to
a versioned jar file seems preferable.  As you mention, if nothing else,
it is consistent with other languages in Debian.  So my vote is to
accept the change.

That fact that so many packages are affected does mean there will be a
lot of uploads, but ideally we will upload at least once per release
cycle (anyway), so the timing of this patch and proposal is reasonable.

I am interested to hear other opinions from the Debian Java Team.

Cheers,
tony
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