clojure wrapper script in debian package seems fallen behind

[Elana Hashman]

Hi Martin (cc pkg-clojure-maint),

On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 02:35:03PM +0300, Martin Roos wrote:
>  Hey, I noticed that the clojure wrapper script that comes with debian
> package has a rather new version of clojure attached (1.10.0) but it
> doesn't support all the things that clojure linux installer from
> https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started supports  (deps.edn seems to
> ignored, so seem aliases with -A).

Yup, this is a known issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=902763

For a little history, the clojure script in Debian predates the upstream
clojure CLI tools by at least 5 years. I did not have time to package
and switch over to the new entrypoint script for the buster release, nor
did other folks have a chance to pick that up on the Clojure team.
Unfortunately, I don't work on Clojure at my dayjob anymore, so it makes
it difficult to find the time for some of this more involved
maintenance!

> Not sure if this is just down to the wrapper bash script or if there
> are deeper things there that need changing (then again, if a simple
> installer bash script can put the dependencies in place we can surely
> make debian package do the same).

The new Clojure CLI has a dependency on tools.deps.alpha which has a
relatively complex dependency tree: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=891136

I discussed patching out support for private S3 maven repos on AWS to
reduce the size of the tree in that bug, but there was still an issue
with jgit and org.clojure/tools.gitlibs that we didn't get around to
before freeze.

>  Not sure if you were aware of the issue yet. I found it out when i was
> trying out clojurl from https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started  and
> couldn't understand why the debian package on my ubuntu box didn't make the
> application work as designed. Took a bit of digging to understand that
> clojure that i installed over apt-get was not the clojure needed to run the
> application :(

I vaguely wonder if I could convince Ubuntu to take a patch to the
stable release that would warn people when they try to use upstream CLI
flags on the Clojure wrapper scripts that aren't currently supported.
That might at least avoid this particular issue.

>  If you need help with testing or something alike, I'm willing to help :)

Definitely feel free to look back over all the ITPs and if anything has
changes with versions which would make new uploads of tools.deps.alpha
and tools.gitlibs easier! I'll still need to do a little patching of the
CLI (and it will be interesting to swap over the CLI package to a
different source package) but that's the work that needs to be done.

Cheers,

- e
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