Replace former "Intent to package" at Debian

• Kotlin ITP
• Docs "Work-Needing and Prospective Packages"
• Docs "How will my package get into Debian?"
• Docs "How to report a bug in Debian using reportbug"
• Docs "Debian bug tracking system"
• chat logs

added Infrastructure P: high labels

assigned to @nicoalt

changed the description

marked this issue as related to briar-debian#2 (closed)

marked this issue as related to python-briar-wrapper#17 (closed)

marked this issue as related to briar-gtk#72 (closed)

changed title from Close former Debian requests for sponsorship and open new one for Briar Desktop to Replace former "Intent to package" at Debian

changed the description

So I closed the former "Intents to package" at Debian by e.g. sending an email to "971525-done@bugs.debian.org" with the following content:

Subject: Re: ITP: python3-briar-wrapper -- Wrapper around the Briar Headless REST API

Currently there's a lot of activity happening at Briar which results in this ITP getting closed.

Instead of building a desktop client with Python and GTK, we decided to go with a pure Java/Kotlin version using the Compose UI framework [0]. This has the advantage that we no longer need to build a separate REST API for the GTK client to consume but instead can use all the Java classes and methods directly. This saves us a lot of overhead and allows us to build a more feature-complete client throughout the next months, funded by the Prototype Fund [1].

Once the new desktop client is more mature, I will open a new ITP at Debian for a potential briar-desktop package. This package is currently blocked by Kotlin [2], just like the ITP of briar-headless was [3]. See this issue [4] in the meantime if you want to track Briar Desktop's inclusion into Debian.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/

[1] https://prototypefund.de/project/briar-desktop/

[2] https://bugs.debian.org/892842

[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=971526

[4] #50

This needs to be done once we do the first stable release of Briar Desktop.

unassigned @nicoalt

added Sponsor 7 label

mentioned in issue #56 (closed)

mentioned in issue briar-gtk#104 (closed)

added os:debian label

I'd still find it super nice if one could type apt install briar-desktop one day.

We had this discussion before where I think one conclusion was that we need to get all our dependencies and Kotlin into Debian in a compatible version, which I fear probably will never happen.

I have this hunch however that it should be possible to package an uber-jar for debian which basically contains our own code plus all third party dependencies, including Kotlin in a single jar. That package would depend only on the JRE I think.

Doing some research using apt rdepends default-jre there are quite a number of packages to find and I bet there are many apps that do exactly that. One that I identified already is josm. It's a quite complex Swing application and available in Debian bookworm and Ubuntu focal. I have quickly glanced through what they ship in the deb: a 15MB jar file that clearly is an uber jar containing a bunch of dependencies which I could easily verify are third-party dependencies as defined in their ivy.xml.

So bottom line, I believe shipping to Debian might not be as hard as we anticipated

changed milestone to %Desktop 0.2.0

removed Sponsor 7 label

removed milestone %Desktop 0.2.0

marked this issue as related to #261