Hello,

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 12:57 PM Felix Schwarz <fschwarz@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

Am 12.05.20 um 12:32 schrieb Ty Young:
> Right, I figured it was some Fedora policy and not up to you. I suppose I
> should have been more clear there. Sorry for any confusion, it was aimed at
> the Fedora project as a whole as this is a Fedora issue.

This is not a Fedora issue but a consequence of Fedora's core values. You not
agree with it but "building from source" is so fundamental that it does not
make sense to even start a discussion about it on fedora-devel.

I suggest you read up on the rationale behind that policy (which is why I
linked the policy document in the first place).

I agree that building from sources is the right thing to do. However, let me play devil's advocate here :)

What makes Java apps different from other language ecosystems is that Java apps never share dependencies. There is no concept of "system-wide" 3rd-party Java libraries that would be automatically added to classpath when JVM starts. I realize that this is technically possible to achieve, but that is not how people use it. If you want to distribute your Java app, you just bundle it with all its dependencies into a beefy tarball and ship it.

And if Java apps never share dependencies, then developers are not really forced to keep up with latest versions of libraries. Nobody can update the non-existent system-wide Java library that would break their application. They are in control.

For the records, Java is going to get a shiny new "Foreign Memory Access" API, part of Project Panama, (hopefully) in a few years. With it there will be Java applications that have both Java requirements and native library requirements.

Anyone who wants to uses it to create Linux software is going to have to deal with Linux distros breaking their stuff, no matter what they do, just as Fedora broke mine.