Don't flame, remember it's Christmas.
Recompiling Java apps isn't strictly necessary but from a maintainer point
of view it makes sense: they want to assure that the distribution they
provide is as complete and workable as possible. That includes the ability
to build, patch, integrate any software cohesively with all the other
packages. Eg: at work I've seen CRM software that bundles it's own JBoss
tree and there's no way in hell it'll integrate with an "external" instance;
given your pov it's all right and sound but for me, as a sysadmin, it sucks
as I have to accept and track yet another exception to my architectural
plan. There's space for bytecode consumers and for source builders, the
point is that both should be taken care for; especially if the latter help
keeping in touch with the userbase working with your wares.


2006/12/24, Leon Rosenberg <rosenberg.leon@(protected)>:
>
> On 12/24/06, William L. Thomson Jr. <wltjr@(protected):
> > Ask and you shall be answered in detail :)
> >
> > On Sun, 2006-12-24 at 11:20 -0500, David Smith wrote:
> >
> > > 1. Compiling tomcat. Why???
> >
> > Because it's FOSS why not? I might want to use a newer version of things
> > Tomcat is compiled against. There are tons of reasons, thus the link I
> > provided before. Here it is again for reference.
> > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/why-build-from-source.xml
>
> Sorry, I don't buy it. The only valid reason to rebuild tomcat (or
> other java programs / packages) is to patch them, and if I'd wish to
> do it, I would go to the svn of the maintainer and not play around
> with probably broken distribution packages (and yes, they ARE all
> broken, gento, suse, debian, ubuntu).
> I think you would spare your users tons of problems if you would just
> re-distribute the binaries from tomcat.apache.org and not mess around
> with things. Noone who runs tomcat for professional reasons can allow
> the os to do atomatic updates on it, and what is the other reason for
> packaging? And for the newbies the binaries tomcat.apache.org provides
> are perfect (at least they work!).
>
> Btw, when we are on it, can you please remove gcj from the distro?
> This thing is really just annoying! :-)
>
> regards
> Leon
>
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--
Le montagne sono così: devi assecondarle anche se ti sputano in faccia fiele
e veleno.
Perdi se pensi di essere più forte.
Vinci se pensi che non c'è nessuna battaglia.
- Hans Kammerlander