[Debian-science-sagemath] Jmol transition?

[Ximin Luo]

Ximin Luo:
> (re-add Andreas and the bug CC address)
> 
> OK, here's what I've explored so far:
> 
> First you need to svn clone jspecview and jsmol and put them into the parent directory of jmol. You need to find the right revisions corresponding to a particular Jmol release, it's not too hard but needlessly time-consuming.
> 
> Then you can manually call ant in each of these subprojects. JSpecView is quite easy to build, but JSmol is very hard because it uses java2script, an eclipse plugin. As part of the build process you're supposed to configure your eclipse with this plugin, then it will do some stuff. I haven't managed to figure out exactly what yet, because eclipse is old in Debian.
> 
> java2script is here: https://github.com/zhourenjian/java2script/ and the author makes binary releases sometimes on the Google Groups forums: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/java2script
> 
> I've asked about whether it's possible to run this outside of Eclipse, but I think the chances are quite slim for that: https://github.com/zhourenjian/java2script/issues/5
> 

It turns out java2script has a command-line experimental plugin, it's actually quite well documented:

https://github.com/zhourenjian/java2script/blob/j2s-eclipse-3.8/incubator/net.sf.j2s.ui.cmdline/docs/j2s-cmdline-api/j2s-cmdline-api.xml

I have added a Makefile to build it:

https://github.com/infinity0/java2script/blob/j2s-eclipse-3.8/Makefile

It doesn't have too many dependencies actually, so we could in theory package this for Debian. What I did was generate some ANT build.xml files from inside Eclipse 3.8 (Debian), then we can use these to build the rest of the project outside of an Eclipse GUI. Hopefully the auto-generated ANT files will pass NEW.

Then, we *might* be able to use the ui.cmdline to run Eclipse 3.8 in headless mode, to build JSmol. Something like this:

$ eclipse -nosplash -application net.sf.j2s.ui.cmdlineApi -cmd newProject -path Jmol -projectName Jmol -sourceFolders src -outputFolders js -cmd build -projectName Jmol

You'll need the Jmol/.project file for this to have a chance of working. I didn't svn checkout Jmol yet (I was just using the tarballs) so I am missing this file. I don't even know if the above command line is correct.

If someone else wants to play with this in the meantime, please go ahead.

I think it's highly unlikely we'll get this done before Nov 5. But there are only 3 reverse-dependencies, we can probably just upload them after the deadline if we ask very nicely - and TBH the release team will hopefully sympathise with just how much bullshit this package has needed.

X

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