Multilib Middle-Ground

[Les Mikesell]

Colin Walters wrote:
> 
>>>> The point is that for years fedora has had a scheme of package
>> requirements and no standard-compliant JVM that provided them.  And it has a
>> strange symlinked path scheme that needs to be fixed when installing a
>> standard JVM.
> 
> I find the symlink/alternatives structure *so much* better than having
> to munge the PATH and JAVA_HOME environment variables that I don't
> understand why you're complaining about it.

One complaint is that it subverts something obviously intended to be a 
per-process choice into a per-machine configuration. What do you do if 
you, or different users, need to simultaneously run different versions 
of JVM's - something that seems likely during any transition where you'd 
want to keep the old version running until you have thoroughly tested 
its replacement?  But, given that the alternatives structure is there 
even with its limitations, the real issue is that there have been long 
periods of time when you could not find a java-sun-compat package 
documented to work with the current fedora version and that's not 
something you want to set up by hand.

>>  You are confusing 2 issues.  By standard-compliant, I mean the language
>> spec which does exist and as far as I know, nothing fedora has ever shipped,
>> meets.
> 
> I couldn't find the status of OpenJDK 6 is with respect to the TCK in
> a brief search, but if Fedora's shipped package didn't pass I think it
> would be regarded as an important bug.

And you'll just ignore the entire prior history of fedora?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com