please don't fork javahelper

[Thomas Koch]

Hi Eugenio,

welcome to the world of Debian and Debian related discussions! I wish you all 
the best for your project and hope that you'll find the Debian community a 
welcoming place despite the discussions.

I've been reading your GSOC application[1] and your announcement to fork 
javahelper. I'm also working on java related packaging tools (maven-debian-
helper and maven-repo-helper) and I've lately looked into javahelper and saw 
some logic duplication between those tools.

There are many other similar packaging tools for other languages too[3]:
jh_makepkg, maven-debian-helper, dh-make, dh-make-perl, dh-make-php,
dh-make-drupal, gem2deb, python-stdeb, haskell-devscripts, dh-lua, ...

I'd actually like to see some of these tools to converge and reuse logic. All 
of them have to deal with copyright, with the different files in debian/ and 
need to calculate dependencies.

So your plan to fork javahelper and to create just another packaging tool 
terrified me. Are you really sure that you need to fork javahelper and that you 
can not extend javahelper for your needs?


[1] 
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2013/StudentApplications/EugenioCanoManuel
[2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-clojure-maintainers/Week-of-Mon-20130422/000008.html
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=705068

Best regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro