[EMBOSS] Plans for EMBOSS 6.5.0 and 6.6.0, and source-less JAR files.

[Charles Plessy]

Dear EMBOSS developers,


after the good news about EMBOSS being updated to 6.4.0 in Debian, I am back
with more issues about source code, that I hope can be solved with your help.

But first of all, if you have a pre-release of 6.5.0 available, I would
be pleased to test it and report potential build issues on Debian.

While having a fresh look on our package when uploading 6.4.0, we realised
that it contains a lot of Java JAR files for Jemboss, which are third-party
Java libraries in a binary format, with no source code.  The good news is that
a lot of them are already packaged in Debian, so in theory, all we would
have to do is to replace these JAR files from the emboss package in Debian
by symbolic link to their own package.

This means, however, that these libraries may be updated independantly of
Jemboss.  This is exactly what we want to do in a distribution, as it
considerably eases bug fixing, but in the Java world (in contrary to C or
Perl), it is quite uncommon.

So my question is: do you think it has chances to work for Jemboss, and if yes,
what is the best list or person to contact for assistance in our effort ?


PS: on our "Popularity contest" page, you can monitor how the user base of
EMBOSS is still increasing. 

http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=emboss&show_vote=on&beenhere=1

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan