Longtime Chapeau readers may recall last summer’s lament about the state of the Scala ecosystem in Fedora. We’ve taken a lot of steps since then. After a rough patch for the Fedora Scala package, Scala 2.10 is available and works again on all current Fedora releases and Rawhide. We’ve added more Scala packages to Fedora as well, including scalacheck, sbinary, and test-interface. Today I’m especially pleased to announce that, by the time you read this, sbt 0.13.1 will be available in Fedora 20 testing.
Having sbt available in Fedora means that we can start packaging more of the Scala ecosystem in Fedora. In fact, the sbt package in Fedora is primarily intended for use building Scala packages for Fedora. While you’ll be able to use it for general Scala development, it has several important limitations in order to comply with the Fedora packaging guidelines: most notably, you won’t be able to cross-compile libraries for different Scala versions with it or launch different versions of sbt for different projects. (I use sbt-extras, which I’ve renamed to xsbt, for my general Scala development.)
In the future (i.e. F21 and on), sbt-based Fedora builds will be greatly streamlined by improved Ivy support in an upcoming version of xmvn. For now, we have to manage dependencies somewhat manually using scripts and macros, but it’s absolutely straightforward. To get started building Scala projects for Fedora right now, check out these guidelines I wrote up for the Big Data SIG and let me know if you have any trouble. There are many example spec files using sbt available among my Github repositories.
This was a big effort and thanks are due to several people, including Mark Harrah, who offered a lot of advice on sbt itself and gave prompt and thorough feedback on my patches; Mikołaj Izdebski, who helped a lot with my understanding of Java dependency resolution in Fedora and implemented improved support for Ivy resolution in xmvn; Rob Rati, who took on the task of reviewing the sbt package and did a thoughtful and careful job; and the Fedora Packaging Committee for their quick and helpful response to my request for a bootstrap-binary exception.
I’m looking forward to seeing new Scala projects packaged for Fedora soon!