I got a strange breakage with this morning’s updates to jaunty and finally tracked it down to an issue with xulrunner thanks to the comments on this post.  So if you’re getting a blank dialog box on launching eclipse lately the short answer is,

append

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner

to the end of your eclipse.ini after having installed xulrunner.

I’ve been interested in (fascinated by ?) how the Ubuntu distribution is assembled with such regularity and with such a high level of quality for a long time.  I have been running development versions of Ubuntu since feisty I believe and have enjoyed (well most of the time) the occasional breakage as an opportunity to learn more about Ubuntu and linux in general.  For the last year or so I stepped my participation up a bit by trying to be good at reporting bugs in general and actually trying to fix them for instance in bzr or bzr-svn.

This weekend I decided to stop fooling around and try to learn the rudiments of debian packaging with the idea of focusing on java packages and in particular getting software like grails or xwiki packaged on Ubuntu.  So I dove in, learned about packaging on the Ubuntu wiki through the very well written Packaging Guide.  After working on updating the dependencies to openjdk for the existing Groovy package with some help from persia, slytherin and istarex on the #ubuntu-java channel on irc.freenode.net, I managed to do that fixing a bug in the build and removing an unnecessary runtime dependency on the bean shell framework libs.

Today I took a closer look at the hurdles involved in packaging a codebase like grails which has dependencies on parts of large codebases like hibernate and spring which also need to be packaged !  In the process I understood that there would have to be some kind of collective effort to do maven right on Ubuntu for instance so that it can be use as a build tool for java packages.  So I took a closer look at the Ubuntu development process and decided to officially join as an Ubuntero !  I achieved this by reading, agreeing with and signing the Ubuntu Code of Conduct with my pgp key.

I now hope to progressively learn more about the ongoing work, the people involved, and the issues in making Ubuntu a kick-ass platform for java applications in general and for those I love in particular.