[fedora-java] Drop GCJ AOT bits for F11?

[Andrew Haley]

Andrew Overholt wrote:
> * Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> [2008-11-20 11:33]:
>> Andrew Overholt wrote:
>>
>>> Back when we wrote the initial Java packaging guidelines, we said that
>>> packagers *should* include GCJ AOT bits.  Should we remove this
>>> requirement for Fedora 11 and beyond?
>>>
>>> Also, GCJ is still in the base install set for Fedora.  Should we remove
>>> this and make OpenJDK a default?
>>
>> This is a bit premature.  We still don't have the OpenJDK JIT for PPC and
>> ARM arches.  We're working hard on it but it's not ready yet for prime-time.
>> Without the JIT, OpenJDK is crushingly slow on these arches.
> 
> Should Smolt stats on architecture users affect this decision?  It says
> about 0.7% of users are on platforms without OpenJDK JITs.
> 
> http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html

I was hoping to be able to keep all arches going with gcj until a
really first-rate OpenJDK solution was available everywhere.  I don't
think we want to make the useers of these arches into second- class
citizens: Fedora ARM, in particular, is great for mobile devices and
hasn't been supported for very long.  I think its usage will increase.

Sure, the number of users is low, but on lower-performance boxes the
penalty of not having gcj and gcj-compiled packages available is quite
severe.  I wouldn't object to weakening the "should" to a "may" where
aot-compiling is a problem.  Even without precompiled applications,
gcj is still a lot faster than the OpenJDK C++ interpreter.

Andrew.