Java 7 for Fedora 16

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Fri Aug 26 19:10:13 UTC 2011


On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 11:29 -0400, Deepak Bhole wrote:

> Andrew Haley and I just had a chat about this.
> 
> We both agree that weaning off the 1.6 dependency is the best long-term
> solution. We essentially want it so that nothing in Fedora needs 1.6.
> 
> That said, we will continue to ship 1.6 since 3rd party apps may need
> it. We will however remove the alternatives for 1.6, so using them will
> require the user to manually set JAVA_HOME to
> /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0..../ and call the java binary from that dir.
> This will prevent someone from accidentally switching the system
> alternative to 1.6 and having (1.7 built) apps fail.
> 
> Are there any major objections to the above?

In theory, in the long run, no. In the short term, it sounds worrying:
remember the schedule -

http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/f-16-devel-tasks.html

there are less than two months until final freeze (2011-10-17), after
which you'll have no chance to mess with this stuff as none of it is
going to be taken as blocking final release. That seems like quite a
short time frame to make sure everything, or at least all the major
things, in Fedora build and work against Java 7.

I'd say go with the 'everything is Java 7 by default and Java 6 is only
around for backwards compatibility with 3rd-party stuff' plan only if
you're pretty confident you can have everything building and working
against Java 7, to an acceptable level of functionality, by mid-October.
And be really honest with yourself about the likelihood of that
happening.

And I agree with Toshio that this has to go through FESCo. It would be
good to present them with as comprehensive and realistic a survey as
possible of the pros and cons of the various possible approaches.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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