[Ubuntu] GeoServer and GeoTools Debian/Ubuntu Packaging

[Ben Caradoc-Davies]

Jérôme,

have you considered simply repackaging the existing GeoServer binaries? 
In my view, this will save you a great deal of effort.

I recommend shipping the contents of the basic GeoServer war.zip as the 
basic GeoServer. There is a great deal of hidden wisdom in the GeoServer 
release module about which modules are to be included in each release 
artifact (see the developer guide where it mentions "mvn 
assembly:attached"). By depending on the binary artifacts, you are 
recycling this wisdom. Because java bytecode is portable across machine 
architectures, you still support "all" architectures (and I use that 
term in the dpkg sense).

As I mentioned before in another forum there are licence and 
redistribution issues for GeoServer plugins such as Oracle and ArcGIS 
that contain proprietary third-party JDBC drivers; in my view you can 
address these by creating separate .deb packages for these for 
publication through non-free repositories. Some such as MS SQL require 
manual download by every user.

The presence of JAI is detected at runtime. It is not required to use 
GeoServer (but desirable for some mapping applications). If JAI is 
present in some repo and then installed into a JDK, it is a property of 
the JDK used to run GeoServer, not of GeoServer itself.

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <Ben.Caradoc-Davies at csiro.au>
Software Engineer
CSIRO Mineral Resources Flagship
Australian Resources Research Centre