DAG Repos

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Kam Leo wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:22:32 -0500 (EST), Matthew Saltzman
> <mjs at ces.clemson.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005, Mark Haney wrote:
>>
>>>> The best source for Java for FC is jpackage.org.  A bit of a learning
>>>> curve, but it generally works much better than the Sun RPMs.
>>
>> I've added a layer of '>''s to mark the part of your message that was a
>> quote of my message.  If you could configure your mail client to quote
>> messages in a similar way, that would help readability.
>>
>>> Does the jpackage version work with Firefox in FC3?
>>
>> The jpackage Java RPMs require that you grab the Sun (or other) compiler
>> as a tarball and the jpackage nosource RPM, then build the RPMs yourself.
>> The instructions are on the jpackage.org site.
>>
>> I'm using (slightly older, slightly modified) jpackage Sun RPMs with Sun's
>> 1.5.0_01 source, and they are working fine.
>>
>
> Sun offers a Linux rpm package for the latest version of the JRE,
> 1.5.0 Update 2.  There is no need to compile the source unless you
> want the source for another purpose.  Just go to
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp, click on the "Download
> JRE 5.0 Update 2" link., agree to the license agreement, and download
> the JRE, Netbeans or the source.  It's your choice.

The difference isn't whether you get an RPM or source.  You don't get 
source for the JDK either way.  The difference is that the Sun RPMs are 
way out of date and not very well integrated with Fedora.

If all you want is the JRE, it shouldn't make much difference, except that 
you have to symlink to the plugin from /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins yourself. 
If you are doing anything more serious with Java, the JPackage RPMs are 
designed to integrate well with Fedora and with a number of other Java 
tools that JPackage has built.  You can also have multiple Javas installed 
and they play nicely with each other.  The disadvantage is that you have 
to get the JDK itself from Sun (because of redistribution restrictions) 
and build the RPMs yourself.  It's not hard, if you've ever built an RPM 
before.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs