Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Thank you for the “some”. Good way to paper over multiple recursive build and legal problems which seem to be the norm as soon as you lift a typical java bundle lid. Bugzilla is not a blog people only write a few lines here for hours of work.

Swinging the machete is highly unusual for non-Java packages. For Java packages, well, packagers are human too and there is a limit over which they give up or swing the machete. No one is going to spend multiple hours writing long bug reports when upstream does not care a nit (as evidenced by the dismal quality of their source release)

FYI I spend 4 years of my time packaging Java stuff at JPackage (non trivial packages such as tomcat, which have been copied almost all rpm-based distributions) and am still on their admin list, which is experience enough to have some idea of what the average Java source looks like. (I won't claim I was particularly good or inspired, except strangely enough there was no one better asking to take my place). I have been following different packaging efforts in this space for more than a little while. It takes 4 or 5 Java people to make 10% of the progress one person does naturally in other languages. There is such a legacy of forks, non-cooperative reinventing of the wheel, and other bad practices people always try to invent ways not to fix them because as soon as they realise the huge problem pile they want to forget it. Maybe SUN will manage to break the vicious circle with Java 1.7. It will have to release it first however. Also it needs to attain J2EE status before people start to take notice of it (ie it is years away). There is too much money in Java right now to make a purge easy, “lesser” languages at least have no illusion they must strive for the best to survive.

In more than a decade of packaging I've only encountered once a non-java package which was as rotten to the core as the average java package is (argyllcms).

And the problem never was technical (one could have done clean Java releases with make or ant a long time ago) but 100% cultural. JPackage antedates projects like maven yet maven developers quickly ignored all the early feedback JPackage gave them as soon as they realised it went contrary to the usual Java developper (bad) habits.

This is how bad the situation is.
Come back after your own 4 years of dedicated Java packaging before claiming others have no understanding of the Java state, or rejecting responsibility on one particular packager or distribution.