[gentoo-java] Generation of ebuilds with maven build system

[Benda Xu <heroxbd@gentoo.org>]

Hi,

I am interested in packaging spark (bug 523412).  By default maven tries
to download 2.5GiB dependencies into my $HOME.  Spark is large and has a
lot of dependencies.  I bet converting the maven build system of spark
into a manual one[1] will be too complex.

In the mean time, I stepped upon java-ebuilder[2] for creating ebuilds
by parsing pom.xml.  I am maintaining the R overlay[3], which generates
10000+ ebuilds from R package repositories such as CRAN, BIOC, etc.
Similarly, g-sorcery[6] can be used to generate pypi (for python), elpa
(for emacs) ebuilds and overlays.  This is a good packaging model to
deal with large language-specific repositories and ecosystems.

What is the status of java-ebuilder, and is there an example for how to
use it?

maven has 153861 artifacts[4], making manually packaging for Gentoo
impossible.  How about using java-ebuilder to generate ebuilds from the
maven repository and expose them with java overlay[5]?  What do you say?

Cheers,
Benda

1. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Java_Packing_Policy#Maven
2. https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/java-ebuilder.git
3. layman -i R_Overlay
4. http://search.maven.org/#stats
5. layman -i java
6. https://github.com/jauhien/g-sorcery