Multilib Middle-Ground

[Les Mikesell]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>
>> The point is that for years fedora has had a scheme of package 
>> requirements and no standard-compliant JVM that provided them.  And it 
>> has a strange symlinked path scheme that needs to be fixed when 
>> installing a standard JVM.
> 
> ROTFL SUN couldn't even keep a stable JVM naming, let alone a standard
> path, or agree with the other proprietary guys on common conventions, so
> don't invoque a "standard-compliant JVM" when this thing never existed.

You are confusing 2 issues.  By standard-compliant, I mean the language 
spec which does exist and as far as I know, nothing fedora has ever 
shipped, meets.

> An archive of all the SUN, IBM and BEA jvm releases is a baroque history
> of inconsistent paths and name changes no sane third-party package could
> ever depend on (and BTW paths that contradicted existing standards like
> the FHS). What ISVs depend on is a fixed version that uses SUN's
> conventions-of-the-day, which are anything but standard.

I can't argue with that, but the point is that you aren't likely to find 
anything more bizarre or undocumented than fedora's alternatives scheme 
and when you combine the two, it's not something any sysadmin should 
have to deal with when a simple rpm can fix it all.

> Why do you think Java has little life outside J2EE
> servers?

I don't think that at all.  In fact, I think the projects I've already 
mentioned (opennms, alfresco, openfire, spark) are extremely useful and 
moderately popular, and there's probably a lot more, plus an assortment 
of applets for vnc, ssh, xmpp etc., that everyone should have available 
on their servers.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com