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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-dev] www-servers/axis -> commercial dependencies
From:       "William L. Thomson Jr." <wltjr () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2006-12-25 1:45:07
Message-ID: 1167011107.7474.17.camel () wlt ! obsidian-studios ! com
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On Mon, 2006-12-25 at 00:15 +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
>
> Well, they told me, I won't need them ... who the hell's right ?

Your asking users questions you should be asking the Tomcat developers.
Most all Tomcat users never ever even get close to compiling Tomcat.
Either ask the developers, or don't take any ones word and go look at
the sources. There is a build.properties.default file, which is pretty
much all you need to determine Tomcat's dependencies.

For the most part users are clueless and by posting there just opened up
a can of worms. Much less all kinds of false impressions of the state of
Tomcat on gentoo. Thanks for that, although I assume it was not done in
spite or to cause the Gentoo community grief. If so, die now :)

> In other words: tomcat ships lots of bundled third-party packages,
> while gentoo takes them from the upstream ?

Ships a few, and uses even more that are not shipped to build Tomcat. At
the moment we are leaving the build time stuff linked in at runtime. It
does no harm since the stuff is already on your system. If anything it's
a few less commonly used libs on has to link in.

> But then I wonder: if the tomcat folks can simply bundle them in,
> why does gentoo has to suffer from these download restrictions ?

Because instead of using every apps bundled dependencies. We install a
dependency once, and as many apps can link to it as needed. Less
duplicate more re-use.

> hmm, we should do some deeper investigations @ dev@tomcat ...

It's a waste of time. Upstream devs are not to responsive, and TC 5.5.x
is not really being actively developed. All efforts are going towards
Tomcat 6.0.x which was WAY less deps.

> Okay, since I'm not using it in production yet, I'll try the masked 6.0.6.

Fine, I will likely unmask it soon and version the ebuild. Despite
upstream sources not being versioned with beta or alpha. :(

> BTW: 
> 
> What does the jni useflag actually do ? Switch between java and native 
> implementation of certain things (SSL, and what else?) ?

It will build the libtcnative.so or Tomcat's SSL accelerator. Which for
some reason they ship tarred up sources to in the binary Tomcat. Not to
mention Tomcat 6.0.x sources have the native sources in it, yet ant is
set to download a tarball of the sources. It's quite a mess.

So at the moment the JNI flag does nothing, but cause breakage. Ideally
it will build and install libtcnative.so. So Tomcat can use it,
hopefully out of the box. At which time we will be one of the only
distros providing that ;)

> And it seems that ecj is used instead of the default java compiler. 
> Can't jikes be used instead of ecj (IMHO, should be faster) ?

Tomcat devs decided to switch to ecj. Both ecj and jikes come from IBM.
Jikes is no longer being developed. ecj is actively being developed. ecj
is faster than jikes, and many will argue it's faster than javac. Thus
upstream switching to it.

Also because of this, Tomcat only requires a JRE at runtime, not a full
JDK anymore ;)

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.
Gentoo/Java

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