Hand-rolling an Oracle JDK 6 deb with java-package.

After the previous attempt, it occurred to me to ask debian-java. eagle noted the existence of the ancient java-package. This is what Debian used to use to package Sun Java before the distributor licenses. It is not what the recently-available packages were built with (they were built with this, which I can't work out what to do with), but it does build a usable Sun Java. Cédric Pineau updated it and I have, with a patch, used it to package Oracle JDK 6u30 for our actual business use. Here's what I did on my work PC (Ubuntu 10.04 amd64).

1. sudo apt-get install debhelper
2. Get the zip of Cédric's java-package from github, unzip to a suitable directory. cd there. (Mine was /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0.)
3. Move all files from ./lib/* to the same directory. (I ran the script as-was, not as an installed package on my system.)
4. Edit make-jpkg and change lib_dir="/usr/share/java-package" to point to where you've unzipped the thing (e.g., /home/fun/bin/cedricpineau-java-package-b77d4f0)
5. Edit oracle-j2sdk1.6/install with this patch so that even obsolete and horrible stuff is linked in /etc/alternatives the way it was by 6u26. (Note that Matthias Klose, who used to package Sun Java for Debian and Ubuntu, considers parts of this patch an abomination unto Nuggan.)
6. Download the self-extracting JDK bin file from Oracle. (I put it in /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin.)
7. ./make-jpkg /home/fun/Downloads/jdk-6u30-linux-x64.bin

The resulting file has unmet dependencies — so to install, you need to do:

sudo dpkg -i oracle-j2sdk1.6_1.6.0+update30_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

This is guaranteed in no manner whatsoever. However, we've just deployed it to the template image all our new VMs will be cloned from. I'll keep you updated ...