Re: Complicated re-distribution of pgjdbc the "open source way"

Hi all,

--
I'm taking the liberty of CCing all pgjdbc packagers I'm aware of (please
opt-out if you don't care and sorry for rush).  I just want to see whether
we in Fedora are thinking a constructive way.  This is not GNU/Linux
oriented effort, but it is rather about any open source
packagers/distributors, feel free to add anybody who might be interested
in the loop.
--

_Open_ distribution¹ of pgjdbc is becoming a bit painful for the last
several releases, mostly because there are some non-free/windows-only
related _hard_-dependencies (currently osgi.enterprise, waffle-jna) which
disallow us to build pgjdbc on free distro.

The preferred way would be to solve this upstream (making the dependencies
optional), but it is not a mandate of pgjdbc upstream to cooperate on this
-- even patches from us to support pure open source build are not wanted.
As upstream is not interested in non-maven builds, it will be most
probably even worse later.

We've done some small observation around GNU/Linux packages, and it seems
we all reinvent the very similar patches or hacks over and over again.

Because PostgreSQL connector is important part of operating system, we are
thinking about a small friendly fork of pgjdbc, called pgjdbc-foss.  This
should allow us to solve the issue rather sooner than later.

That project idea:

  * we should provide an _easy to use_ (documented how to build from
    source) version-ed tarball, compatible with pgjdbc

  * this tarball would be FOSS source-only, with FOSS dependencies,
    (non-free deps could be possible in future, but only as opt-in
    feature)

  * the build would be 1-step process (no need to build pgjdbc-parent-poms
    first, and others), with some obvious system dependencies

  * that tarball would allow us to 100% build-from-source _without_ tweaks

  * build from this tarball must not rely on maven repositories --
    untrusted content at distribution level

  * the testsuite should be fixed to allow us to run it easily under
    non-root user, on a local/cloud build-box

Would you be interested in having one common code-base for
open-source-distribution-model of pgjdbc, and optionally (preferably)
cooperate?  That source should be as close as possible to pgjdbc, just
limited limited set of patches to allow us to build/test/distribute
correctly and what is more important we could do the job _consistently_
with a lot _less_ packagers effort.

Just let me know if this is good/bad idea from your packackar's POV.  Some
links for discussion with upstream about issues [1,..N].

¹ By that I mean ability to build from FOSS source, _against_
  FOSS source dependencies.  By FOSS source I mean software which
  _anybody_ can read, study, copy, modify, distribute.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1831842355.39585708.1455624950515.JavaMail.zimbra@redhat.com
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/2113338928.20942725.1448530160996.JavaMail.zimbra@redhat.com
[3] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/5479464.pnS2mdyLUu@nb.usersys.redhat.com
[4] http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/2217774.p6G2ev8LQ6@nb.usersys.redhat.com

Pavel



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