Andrew Vaughan wrote:
>
> Debian stable is uh, stable. Except for security bugs or other
> serious bugs, it doesn't get updated.
I see. I've read Kraft's "Debian System" book several times, but I
hadn't twigged that stable can't get packages added to it. So if I want
to run Tomcat on main, than I need a machine tht isn't running Sarge.
OK, thanks.
>
> If you prefer tomcat4, why not just use the packages in contrib.
> Everything in contrib is supposed to be free software. It just has
> build and/or runtime dependencies on non-free software.
That was a bit of a throwaway; if I have to be non-free at all, I may as
well go the whole hog, and run it on Windoze. I'm not up for compromises.
>
> If you want to use debian's Tomcat5 packages, then a quick look at
> the dependencies suggest that a mixed sarge/etch system is probably
> ok iff you're prepared to run a Sun/IBM jre/jdk.
Yup. See above. If it's not free, then I don't really see the point of
struggling with it atg all.
> You could also create an etch chroot and run Tomcat from there.
I know what chroot is supposed to do; but I'm no linux guru, and I don't
yet understand how I can use chroot to isolate etch from a system that
thinks it's Sarge. I'll have to look into that.
>> Is there some place I can keep up-to-date on what is going on with
>> Tomcat 5.5 in Etch?
>>
Yah. My mailbox will complain - those tend to generate bot traffic. I
meant human-originated stuff.
[snippage]
> Jetty is in contrib (unstable only). A quick look shows no obvious
> reason why it couldn't be moved to main, so it may still be in
> contrib purely because no-ones gotten around to moving it. (It
> build-depends on ant, which was in contrib when Jetty was first
> uploaded.)
Java stuff tends to depend on ant; I read something that seemed to say
that ant was licence-dodgy, at some point in time. Pages need timestamps!
>
>
>
>> I'm still at a loss to understand why it's so hard to find pages on
>> the web that deal with the state of servlets on free operating
>> systems, and are also up-to-date.
Yeah, those are the links I've been exploring for the last week or so.
>
>> The impression I have is that people who run servlets on Debian
>> today don't really care too much about freeness. They all seem to
>> be using Sun runtimes. But I haven't been searching on "Fedora
>> servlets" - perhaps FC5 is the way to go. Seems a shame.
>
> I suspect that many of people hosting commercial apps are probably
> running on top of Sun's/IBM's jre/jdk, mainly because Sun's jre/jdk
> is the implementation that things tend to be tested/certified
> against. (And in the commercial hosting world, where downtime equals
> dollars, that matters).
My background is mainly commercial, and my last employer relied on Sun.
But if I'm going to be freeee, I want to be completely freeee.
>
> A good place to ask is probably somewhere the J2EE developers hang
> out, eg the
javalobby.org forums.
Yeah, I may end up there eventually.
>> But I'd sooner do it with Debian/Sarge/main, even if that means I
>> can't use Tomcat. And I don't mind participating in a testing
>> effort. It's not a commercial project that I'm doing, after all.
>
> Testing is always welcome, but there is little point testing sarge,
> since sarge is stable, and only serious bugs will be fixed.
See above; I hadn't twigged that Sarge can't have packages inserted, if
they're OK.
>
> HTH
Yes, your remarks have beeen very helpful!
Best regards,
Jack.
