One thing I forgot in my previous reply to this post:
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
As you say, it's "SHOULD", and the maintainers argue
that it'll be much
easier for them to do it in this way.
I believe that the rationale for doing the opposite of a SHOULD ought to be
much stronger than "it'll be much easier for them to do it in this way". The
easy way is often not the right way, which is why we have packaging
guidelines at all.
In the particular case of bundling libraries, there are a few valid reasons
for it that I can see, e.g.:
* The bundled library is patched, and the project does not compile or has
unfixable bugs with the upstream version of the library.
* The bundled library is older or newer than the system version, and the
project does not compile or has unfixable bugs with the version of the
library packaged in Fedora, and providing a compatibility library is
impractical (e.g., because the application is the only one needing that
particular version of the library).
* The bundled library has no canonical upstream version at all.
* The upstream build system does not support building against the system
version, and it is impractically hard to patch it downstream to do so.
(But the packager should at least try to get a person more familiar with
the build system to have a try at it.)
None of these appear to be satisfied for OpenJDK, considering that there are
configure switches (that will be toggled by the Change), and that OpenJDK
works now with the system versions of the libraries. Hence, I see the use of
bundled libraries as an unnecessary shortcut that degrades packaging quality
for no good reason other than one person or team's convenience.
Kevin Kofler