Re: Re: JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[Fernando Lozano]

Hi,
> > > > If I am, is there a timeframe for certified builds?
> > >
> > > No.
> >
> > :-(
> >
> > Please, Red Hat, drop a few bucks for this! ;-)
>
> What has Red Hat's bucks got to do with this?

Sorta kidding -- see the ;-) ?

But isn't Red Hat kindgly giving time of some employees to work on IcedTea, and didn't they do the same for GCJ ?
> > But someone told about incompatibilities on Fedora Java packages
> > that prevented OpenJDK 7 / IcedTea 2 from being the default Java in
> > F16.
>
> It was too early, really.  The worst problem is that packages compiled
> with Java 7 don't run on Java 6.  This is by design: by default
> compiled classes are marked as being runnable on a 7+ virtual machine
> only.  So, once you compile Fedora packages with Java 7 there's no
> going back.

Very reassuring. So it's only the work involved in checking each one of thousands specs.

I remember being bitten by this issue on OpenJDK 6 x Java 5. I even submitted a patch to Fedora Xerces package, so I could run Fedora provided ant with proprietary Sun JDK 5. Nice being able to say I had a small contribution for the wonderful distro which is Fedora. :-)
> > PS: I am writing an aticle about open source java jvms, it looks
> > like GNU Classpath, GCJ, JamVM, CacaoVM, Kafee are dead, although
> > not officially like Apache Harmony. Anyone can comment on this,
> > mayne on a new thread?
>
> We're still using gcj, but it's not being worked on very much.  It's
> still closer to Java 1.5 than anything else.  JamVM and Cacao are
> very much alive.

Thanks for the info.

So all F16 packages build with OpenJDK 6 are supposed to work with the also supplied GCJ ? Or didn't you tested so far ?

[]s, Fernando Lozano

JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[Andrew Haley]

On 11/29/2011 06:42 PM, [e-mail] wrote:
> > > > > If I am, is there a timeframe for certified builds?
> > > >
> > > > No.
> > >
> > > :-(
> > >
> > > Please, Red Hat, drop a few bucks for this! ;-)
> >
> > What has Red Hat's bucks got to do with this?
>
> Sorta kidding -- see the ;-) ?
>
> But isn't Red Hat kindgly giving time of some employees to work on
> IcedTea, and didn't they do the same for GCJ ?

Oh yeah.  I lead a whole team of people doing exactly that.  As soon
as we get the Java 7 TCK, we'll do the work.
> > > But someone told about incompatibilities on Fedora Java packages
> > > that prevented OpenJDK 7 / IcedTea 2 from being the default Java in
> > > F16.
> >
> > It was too early, really.  The worst problem is that packages compiled
> > with Java 7 don't run on Java 6.  This is by design: by default
> > compiled classes are marked as being runnable on a 7+ virtual machine
> > only.  So, once you compile Fedora packages with Java 7 there's no
> > going back.
>
> Very reassuring. So it's only the work involved in checking each one
> of thousands specs.

And also not wanting to break things for people using Java 6.
> I remember being bitten by this issue on OpenJDK 6 x Java 5. I even
> submitted a patch to Fedora Xerces package, so I could run Fedora
> provided ant with proprietary Sun JDK 5. Nice being able to say I
> had a small contribution for the wonderful distro which is
> Fedora. :-)

Excellent!
> So all F16 packages build with OpenJDK 6 are supposed to work with
> the also supplied GCJ ?

No, sorry.  Some do, some don't.

Andrew.

JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[Joe Zeff]

On 11/29/2011 10:42 AM, [e-mail] wrote:
> Very reassuring. So it's only the work involved in checking each one of thousands specs.

That, at least, can be automated.  The big problem is deciding which of 
the compiled classes that require version 7+ could run on earlier 
versions because for that you actually need to examine the code.  (Well, 
you could always recompile them on an older version of Java and see what 
happens, but that still takes time.)