F8 and Staroffice8

Christopher A. Williams fedoralists at cawllc.com
Wed Nov 21 14:12:07 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 12:19 +0000, Mike C wrote:
> Simon Andrews <simon.andrews <at> bbsrc.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > It's a problem with a change the X libraries in F8.  The Sun java hasn't 
> > caught up yet.  Using IcedTea from F8 should have been OK though - are 
> > you sure the installer is using the system JRE and doesn't include its own?
> > 
> > There is a discussion and a work round for this problem at:
> > 
> > http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=171763
> 
> This is a problem with a number of commercial packages which include java
> within their distribution - and this includes Maple and Matlab.
> 
> I had a note from the Maple people and quoting:
> "Actually this bug applies to more then just Fedora 8. Anyone who has a
> Linux distribution with an updated X11 library included in it can
> encounter this problem. We did a little checking on this bug a while ago
> and we're not sure who's responsible for this; either the X11 people are
> or the Java people are. They know what causes the bug but they don't
> know how to fix it.
> 
> Basically X11 is being very strict with some of the checking they do
> before they'll do anything with the display and Java isn't being strict
> enough. Sun says it's not their problem and that it's fixed."
> 
> If you are using the sed edit workaround it is important to find all the 
> files that need changing and not necessarily two files. There are other 
> workarounds that have been suggested but it seems not all work for all
> people.

This is starting to get REALLY FRUSTRATING...!

The upshot of what I'm reading here is that the "X guys" and the "Java
guys" are in what amounts to a pissing contest over how strict someone
should be with a thread safe call, and the loser in all of this is:
Me?!?

Would a responsible person in the Fedora X team please consider that we
can't always use Iced Tea because a lot of important, commercial
packages that we would _like_ to run on F8 will not since they require
that you use their own built-in JREs, and that's not going to change
anytime soon. We also won't always be able to patch some other vendor's
built-in JRE with the so-called "sed trick".

I think the appropriate thing to do is to temporarily roll the X libs in
question in F8 back to the F7 versions (or their equivalents) until the
X and Java guys work out their own differences. As it currently stands,
these apps will not run - so xlib is keeping the overall system stable
by one arbitrary standard by making the system useless for a notable set
of popular, needed applications. Whether that stability standard is
appropriate or not doesn't matter - for all practical purposes, the apps
are still broken, and nobody is fixing it.

Will the F8 developers responsible for these libs step up to the plate?

Cheers,

Chris

--
====================================================
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice there is.

--Yogi Berra




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