Fedora and JPackage proprietary JDK shims

[Les Mikesell]

Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  I can say that OpenNMS won't currently work with a 1.6 version because it's
>> developers have said so.
> 
> So what you're really saying is Fedora doesn't support Java < 6 very
> well. 

Yes, as in what pretty much all existing large projects use.  I actually 
haven't investigated this much beyond OpenNMS and would be happy to hear 
otherwise about opengrok, alfresco, openfire, spark etc.

 > I don't think anyone would disagree, but you have to understand
> it's not a very interesting problem; these projects should really be
> working to update for 6, regardless of Fedora or OpenJDK - Java 5 is
> in pure maintenance mode now.

Maintenance mode is what developers using things like.  No surprises.

> I'm sure there's a fair amount of software out there that doesn't work
> on Java 6, but it's not "most" by a long shot.

Do you have some examples of large and useful things like those above? 
I suppose jboss should be the canonical example.

>>> It's been well known for years how to install the proprietary
>>> JDK;
>>>
>>  Well known by?
> 
> Really...it's in a lot of FAQs, etc.

Are any of them fedora-hosted where a user would likely look for this 
information?

>>  That would have been just fine, but there have been long intervals where
>> jpackage has not had a suitable repo (and again, I don't see any reason that
>> should even have needed to change across fedora versions since java code is
>> pretty much independent of anything else)
> 
> Perhaps; I've personally only used the jpackage shims on RHEL (which
> is much closer to jpackage's target audience).

But EL5 wasn't supported for long after its introduction either.

>> and in earlier conversations here
>> I thought someone said the relationship was deliberately broken with
>> portions moved into fedora packages and the rest ignored.
> 
> If Fedora and JPackage were on Facebook, the relationship status would
> be "It's complicated".  But we are cooperating on many levels, and I
> would certainly not call it broken.

Is this changing?  I do see some stuff for f7/8 that I didn't think was 
  there before.

> Bottom line - should Fedora ship the proprietary JDK shim?  I don't
> think it's worth the user confusion over just telling people to go to
> JPackage, but if someone stepped up, did the work, and submitted it
> and was going to maintain/own it, it might happen.

If jpackage has a suitable documented repo, that's fine.  I just 
couldn't find any for fc7/8 or rhel5 for a year or so.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmiksell at gmail.com