The inclusion of OpenJDK 6 into the core of Fedora, Debian, OpenSuse and Ubuntu has enabled millions of GNU/Linux users to easily obtain the latest version of the Java SE platform. This has changed the packaging landscape for Java software, since ISVs and distro builders can now rely on the Java platform being available out of the box. Planned enhancements to the Java programming language aim to further simplify packaging by making Java software more modular and more explicit about its dependencies. In this talk we’ll describe the mechanisms that make GNU/Linux package management scale to thousands of packages and millions of users; show how to create good packages for inclusion in mainstream distributions (regardless of programming language); and share lessons learned from packaging Sun’s major Open Source Java projects like OpenJDK, NetBeans and Glassfish.
