F8 and Staroffice8

[Simon Andrews]

Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> 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.

With the best will in the world this isn't going to happen, and 
personally I don't think it should.

Fedora includes IcedTea which is to all intents and purposes the Sun JRE 
(v1.7).  It's been compiled to work with the X libs on F8 and works just 
fine.

X has moved on and keeping an old version around to satisfy dependencies 
in non fedora software isn't going to enourage those packages to get 
fixed up for the new version.  The fix is fairly straight forward and 
Sun will almost certainly have updated packages out soon which reflect 
this.  For any other software the authors just need to apply the simple 
patch to the specific JRE they distribute.

These kinds of breakages seem to happen with some component in every 
Fedora release (with F7 it was python and zope I seem to remember). 
Fedora is specifically pitched as having the latest upstream versions of 
everything and whilst this may cause temporary inconvenience it does 
help to move things forward.

If you can't live with the new X libs yet then stay on F7 until this is 
all sorted out.

Simon.

PS Hopefully the inclusion of a free JRE in the core distribution will 
put an end to the inclusion of a program specific JRE alongside java 
programs in linux.  That always seemed a really hacky way to make your 
programs work.