Discontinuing the Packaging of JARs in Linux Distributions

[pepone]

Background:

During the 3.7 release series, we ship Java packages containing the JARs required for the development of Ice Java applications. The primary motivation for this was to enable users to create Ice Java applications that depend on these packages. This is especially relevant for official Debian build packages, as all packaging must be done offline (for instance, a Debian package cannot fetch dependencies from Maven Central).

A significant challenge with this approach is the need to maintain compatibility with the outdated Gradle version included in Debian-based systems. Debian currently uses Gradle 4.4, even though the latest available Gradle release is 8.3.

Proposal:

I propose discontinuing the packaging of JARs in Linux distributions. This would simplify our build system by only needing to support recent versions of Gradle.

The fact is that most Java applications would just use Maven to obtain the required Ice JARs and these packages are rarely used.

Implications:

This would mean the removal of the IceGridGUI package from the official Debian packages. However, we could offer it as a standalone JAR file available for download on our website.