(proposed by dmorgan)
The Java packaging in Mandriva 2010.1 (from which Mageia was forked) was just unusable. Many of the packages were obsolete and not really maintained. The task of updating packages had become very difficult as Maven, a now very common Java project build tool, was not properly integrated in the distribution. Many Java libraries installed using the old packages would not be usable by Maven. Moreover the version of Maven was obsolete and would not allow building recent software. This was a serious problem for maintaining the Java stack.
Fortunately, thanks to the collaboration between Mageia (dmorgan), openSUSE (Stephen Shaw) and Fedora (Alexander Kurtakov and Stanislav Ochotnicky), the first release of Mageia will include a fully updated and clean Java stack. Maven is now available as version 3.0.3. More than 200 Java packages have been updated and are now correctly integrated with Maven.
We hope that this update will help us maintain more java packages in the future. If you are a Java user or packager, your feedback is welcome on the Mageia development mailing list or the Mageia Bugzilla.
If you are interested in Java and packaging, we need your help in the Java team. People from this team will:
- help keeping the Mageia Java stack up to date
- collaborate with other linux distributions to share packages and patches when possible
Nice job, will be looking forward, maybe i will find some time to help you with the java packages in future.
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