[Pkg-mono-devel] Packaging IKVM: inclusion of 3rd-party sources

[David Paleino]

Hello,
as part of the Debian Mono Team, I'm trying to get ikvm [1] into an usable
state.
I've contacted the upstream author, since the build process is *nasty*, at
least: it *requires* GNU Classpath's and OpenJDK's sources (upstream specified
that a *full* *build* of OpenJDK is required, because of some generated files),
and including them inside debian/ is not a great idea to me because:

1) *enormous* diff.gz;
2) security headaches -- code duplication is never nice;
3) hard maintainability.

Upstream noted that he does provide pre-generated .zips with all the needed
files to build IKVM. I suppose that this makes ikvm non-free (pre-built
binaries), but the binaries are effectively coming from software in main (GNU
Classpath and OpenJDK).

How should I behave here?

  1) Should I include the sources in debian/ and do all the needed steps to get
  a full compile? (notice that if we follow this, each IKVM build will include
  an OpenJDK build...)

  2) Or should I make two separate (source) packages, "ikvm" and
  "ikvm-build-deps", with the former Build-Depends on the latter? Also, would
  this be acceptable? (probably ikvm-build-deps would go into non-free, and
  ikvm into contrib?)

Any suggestion is very welcome.

Regards,
David Paleino

[1] that is, the JVM ported on Mono

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