I'm working on getting a working tomcat5 on my FC2 system, using the packages at http://www.jpackage.org/. A serious issue with setting up any kind of Java environment is that many packages have ugly licensing restrictions that prevent easy distribution as an unencumbered RPM. (See the JPackage site for the politics and technical details.) Several packages must use a "nosrc" RPM that requires that one download the actual source from the upstream (usually Sun) and then mix it with what would normally go in a SRPM to create one's binary RPM. The big reason I use yum instead of raw RPM is because it does dependency resolution and downloads the necessary dependencies automatically. This breaks when some of the dependencies are nosrc. Those dependencies must be manually downloaded, repackaged, and installed before resuming use of yum. While yum can't install the nosrc dependency, it would be nice if it could identify the required package. For tomcat5, 3 of the 4 nosrc requirements match the package name on the JPackage site. But one (j2sdk) has no matching package name. I'm guessing that j2sdkee is the package required. It would be nice if yum could inspect a list of nosrc packages to find the ones needed to satisfy the requirements. Sort of a "nosrc repo" that contains only metadata and no actual packages.
