Multilib Middle-Ground

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 2:01 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  One complaint is that it subverts something obviously intended to be a
> per-process choice into a per-machine configuration. What do you do if you,
> or different users, need to simultaneously run different versions of JVM's -
> something that seems likely during any transition where you'd want to keep
> the old version running until you have thoroughly tested its replacement?

You set PATH and JAVA_HOME, just like you did before.  What the
alternatives system gives you is a sane way to make one the default,
which you need to have it integrated with other components of the
operating system.

> But, given that the alternatives structure is there even with its
> limitations, the real issue is that there have been long periods of time
> when you could not find a java-sun-compat package documented to work with
> the current fedora version and that's not something you want to set up by
> hand.

I don't see a lot of value in continuing to discuss this, given that
in the near future all supported Fedora releases (8 and 9) will have
built-in very complete Free Java implementations.