Re: [gentoo-java] Why Netbeans 5.0 isn't available trough portage yet?

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk@gentoo.org>]

Jerônimo Backes wrote:
> Can someone answer that, please?
> 
> Netbeans 5 was released 3 or 4 months ago, and yet it is still not
> available to install trough portage (the same for Netbeans 4.5, that
> never appeared into portage, even 1 year after its release)
> 
> Is there some reason for this?

Funny you should mention this. We've been in contact with Roman Strobl
from Sun lately, who's been very anxious about us making NetBeans 5.0
available in Portage.

What Greg says about the freeze and our state of being understaffed is
of course correct, and are the main reasons.

There is another, however, that makes us downprioritize NetBeans: it has
a lot of painful dependencies. If you look at the dependency graph of
NetBeans 4.1, you will see that it depends on JMX, JAF, JavaMail, JIMI
and a few other packages that we cannot package properly, because we
don't have a redistribution license.

This means that in order to install NetBeans, a user needs to manually
download about six different packages from the Sun website *and*
register hirself (JMX requires registration). This is very painful.

What's more painful is that the upstream availability of these packages
changes; now and again, the files are replaced and old versions are no
longer downloadable. Even worse, the binary content of the file may
change, but the filename stays the same. This kills our md5sum verification.

For these reasons, we simply cannot afford to spend the time maintaining
the package properly -- maintenance of the dependencies is the killer --
and that's also why NetBeans 4.0 and 4.1 are only in ~arch.

Now the good news: Sun has recently relicensed everything we need to
package this properly, except JavaHelp and JMX. I have on good authority
that they're trying to liberate JavaHelp, and possibly also JMX. If so,
NetBeans 5.0 will be nicely packaged and moved into stable as soon as
our 1.5 migration is over.


Also: If you have a particular interest in helping out with NetBeans
5.0, please say so, and you can start testing/hacking on our current 5.0
ebuild that's in our experimental overlay.

-- Karl T
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