java again really

[Les Mikesell]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>>>
>>> man alternatives
>>
>> Do you think this manual page will help someone who doesn't have a 
>> jpackage-style installation or compat package?  What is needed is for 
>> that to be included in the disto.  Or at least full documentation on 
>> all of the symlinks needed to construct one by hand.
>>
>    Amazing how I read man ln and understand how to make a sim link, and 
> then enter the two locations backward. I think the only way to get it to 
> work is provide the ln in detail so it can be copied over to a terminal 
> and done.
> 
>    I found it takes just a few minutes to get the sim links made but it 
> took hours to find out where they should go between.

A good comparison would be putting a penny behind a broken fuse because 
you can't find the correct replacement.  It works - and you've 
simplified things a bit.  And in all the criticism you've received, you 
might note that no one has supplied a link to the part you should have 
used or the documentation you should have followed to get a valid java 
into F8.  As far as I can tell such a thing doesn't officially exist, at 
least not in any of the normal places for fedoras newer than FC6.

'alternatives' is just a more complicated scheme of symlinks designed so 
  multiple install packages that provide the same thing can be installed 
at the same time without overwriting each other and the choice of which 
to use as the default can be made by using the 'alternatives' program to 
  connect the symlinks in your PATH to point to a hidden set that point 
to the hidden program of choice.  For example you can install both 
sendmail and postfix and use this mechanism to determine which one is 
used.  Personally I think it is a bad idea for several reasons.  One is 
that it hides things that should be exposed and documented.  The other 
is that, especially with java jvm's, if you have more than one installed 
it is very likely because you need them both and possibly both at the 
same time running different processes.  This works fine if you supply 
the PATH/CLASSPATH, but now you (a) have no documentation for the 
correct locations, and (b) the location is distribution-specific so the 
documentation and startup settings have to be different for every 
platform.  And, as you experienced, it makes it much harder to integrate 
things not anticipated by the distribution packagers.


>   It would be good if a good test existed for java performance. My 
> experience was that the installed java 1.5 did not support installing 
> jedit. In fact it didn't even install it complete.  After getting java 
> 1.6 working jedit installed right in much less time and appears to be 
> working fine.
> 
>     Not a good test however :-)

A definitive java compatibility test does exist and is available from 
Sun.  However, I believe that the terms of usage prevent publication of 
the results.  Things that don't pass should simply not be called java, 
even in an invocation of the alternatives program.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com