[Nix-dev] Advice for a JVM-based package

[Marc Weber]

> I helped package Leiningen for Debian, which ended up being much more
> complicated since their policy requires that each dependency of
> Leiningen is packaged independently. Is my the approach I've taken
> here acceptable for nix or does it need to be broken up more?
Have a look at Eclipse. I had a look at Mandrive build scripts for emacs
once - then I undertood why it was outdated ..

Adding all licenses of the packaged libraries could be useful.
Other than that I personally would not spend too much additional time on
it. IMHO life is too short anyway.

> As it is, my package works as long as you do "nix-env -i openjdk"
> first, but obviously this is not desirable.
We don't have "meta package" Ideally your package should work using
either jre or jdk. On the other hand having too many options is overkill
as well. I'd just make it depend on 'jre' using a wrapper. There should
be multiple examples such as freemind.

How to find examples? grep for jre or jdk. If navigation is too slow get
github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-nix which implements a "follow import
paths" feature.

> How do I depend on openjdk
> without depending on Oracle's?
I don't know the details about jdk packages..
If you fetch binaries you'll only install runtime dependencies.
if you run garbage collector compile dependencies (such as .tar.gz
files) can be collected. Not sure what happens in this case.

Marc Weber