[Debian-med-packaging] Status of netbeans (... and what to do with igv)

[Andrew Ross]

On 15/08/14 22:09, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Thanks for the explanation.  So I wonder whether it makes sense to keep
> on depending from netbeans if IGV is full of binary JARs anyway
> (unfortunately - that's why it is in non-free).  If netbeans remains RC
> buggy without anybody caring about it we could consider leaving the JAR
> containing the libnb-absolutelayout-java inside igv code and it could at
> least migrate to (non-free) testing.
>
> Or is there any work ongoing to fix netbeans?
>
> Kind regards
>
>      Andreas.
>

Bundling the jar sounds like the best option to me. Keeping Netbeans
working with the current versions of dependencies in Debian, and making
sure we have all the dependencies, has become too time consuming. Going
forward I can see two realistic options (could do both):

1. Provide a package which downloads a build version of Netbeans,
generates binary packages for it, and installs those packages. This
would be similar to how flashplugin-nonfree works, and so the package to
do this would go in contrib I guess.

2. Move Netbeans back to non-free, and bundle all the jars provided by
upstream to avoid version issues with what is currently in Debian.

Keeping the Netbeans platform up to date is more feasible - not sure if
that is of any use to other projects or not.

Thanks,
Andy