Jmagick politics

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 6:07 PM, William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have noticed that jmagick is not in most distribution's repository.
> Whenever that happen, I always assume there is a story behind it, may be
> copyright or just an impossible to work with developers like xen before
> they polished their acts.
>
> Anyone know the story behind jmagick luck of support?
>
> William
>
Most likely simpler than that...

It's a Java framework, and what with the main Java implementation being
sorta-open-source, sorta proprietary to Sun Microsystems, I mean, to
Oracle, well, there aren't vastly many Java things that get tied tightly
into Linux distributions.

After all, if you require up-to-date Java, that requires that, as part of
the installation process, that the would-be gentle user needs to click
their way through licensing UIs at http://something.oracle.com.

For a long time, that discouraged distributions from giving themselves
dependencies on Java.  (One might want to distinguish "critical"
dependancies, e.g. - if you wrote a version of init in Java, from
"noncritical" ones.  Tomcat would be an excellent case of the latter.  Mind
you, having a bunch of apps that depend on Tomcat pushes things more in the
"critical" direction...)

I notice that on one of my Debian systems, there are ~500 dependencies on
JRE.  These tend to be somewhat repetitive, a cross product of ~100 apps x
several versions of each, against "default-jre".  Quite a lot are framework
items, like Tomcat, Eclipse, JBoss, Maven.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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