Re: The fate of ditaa.jar (9.4.5.)

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com> writes:

> Jarmo Hurri <jarmo.hurri@iki.fi> writes:
>
>> Greetings.
>>
>> I pulled the latest master and noticed that contrib has been moved into
>> a separate repository. I also cloned this contrib repository, but can
>> not find the file
>>
>> scripts/ditaa.jar
>>
>> in the repo. In fact, there is no directory scripts in the repo.
>>
>> The documentation in the latest master states that
>>
>> Stathis Sideris wrote the ‘ditaa.jar’ ASCII to PNG converter that is now
>> packaged into the org-contrib repository.
>>
>> How should I proceed? Should I build this separately
>>
>> https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa
>
> You don't need to build it: it's available in the release area
>
> https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa/releases
>
>>
>> or will it still be included into contrib?
>
> In general, I think it's a better idea to point to the canonical sources
> and document how to integrate it into Org mode, than bundle things like
> that, but I have no idea how things are going to go. I'm sure there will
> be some problems that will need fixing one way or another.

I agree. As pointed out already, just bundling the jar file is not
sufficient as you need a java runtime as well. If we bundle it, we also
need to ensure it is updated if/when new jar versions are released. 

Better to clearly document where to get the dependencies and point to
the appropriate installation instructions.

I think we also need to keep in mind that we are currently in a bit of a
transition stage with the move to using ELPA and non-gnu ELPA. There
will be teething problems needing to be worked through both before and
after the transition. 
-- 
Tim Cross