Fedora and JPackage proprietary JDK shims

Stuart Children stuart at terminus.co.uk
Fri May 2 23:52:41 UTC 2008


On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 01:44:04PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> 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.  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.

Surely this is the key in this discussion. I would imagine people are agreed 
that Fedora isn't going to stay at 1.4 or below. Once you've accepted 1.5, IME
1.6 is a small step.

> >  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.

I echo that from my experiences (both professional and personal).

> It depends on the sphere of software... 90% of our business software
> only works on 1.4.2 and the other 10% only works on 1.5. And so does
> all of the java apps the company programmers have written to work with
> the closed source stuff. When we asked when they would support 1.6..
> the word was they weren't.. they would go to 1.7 when it was released
> or .NET because Java was just not 'stable' enough for them.
> 
> While thats all closed source.. the mindset affects others who work on
> Java in the open.

Just to chime in with a very differing experience. I work for a pretty large
company (whose business is not IT, but has a significant IT department) 
with quite a few internal Java apps. My team has been using 
1.6 for all current development for some time. Most others I'm aware of are 
using at least 1.5. Both here and at a previous company we've moved forward
major JVM versions to pick up useful new features or obscure bug/performance
fixes - the latter not ideal upgrade reasons obviously. :) The JRE installed 
on desktops (and so what any GUI-apps will be using) is 1.5. As you say....
it depends.

In my team's main product we use a lot of open sources libraries and 
components, and a few commercial (totally close source) ones too. IME, 
anyone whose product is reasonably active will not be ignoring 1.6.

Cheers

-- 
Stuart




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