F21 System Wide Change: Headless Java

Stanislav Ochotnicky sochotnicky at redhat.com
Tue Nov 19 16:15:15 UTC 2013


Quoting Toshio Kuratomi (2013-11-19 10:49:57)
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 09:29:40AM +0100, Stanislav Ochotnicky wrote:
> > Quoting Toshio Kuratomi (2013-11-18 17:08:12)
> > > On Nov 15, 2013 4:09 AM, "Stanislav Ochotnicky" <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Quoting Jaroslav Reznik (2013-11-15 12:28:11)
> > > > > * (optional) Mass-change spec files that have "Requires: java" to
> > > "Requires:
> > > > > java-headless"
> > > > >
> > > > > Other developers:
> > > > > * Modify spec files to have "Requires: java-headless" instead of
> > > "Requires:
> > > > > java"
> > > 
> > > Could you say a few words about why a java-headless package was chosen
> > > instead of java-x11 (as an example name)?
> > > 
> > 
> > I believe the term was chosen because it's widely used term in Java world.
> > Oracle uses that term in official documentation as well[1]. Last but not least,
> > Debian uses that term as well and I see no reason to be different just for the
> > sake of it.
> > 
> I mean (and sorry that I wasn't clear), why the choice to make java-headless
> the special case?  Especially if (as it appears from the reply to Jerry
> James), most packages in Fedora will only need the headless version.
> 
> (So the headless version would be the java package,  The version with the
> gui nevironmen deps would be java-x11 or similar).

If someone wanted to install just OpenJDK for their own in-house Java
application they would have to know to request full -x11 version. I would wager
we'd be receiving a lot of bugs if we went this way. If someone needs headless
they will be actively looking for it. If they want "java" they will not consider
that they might get incomplete version. Not to mention possible 3rd party RPMs
that might exist

-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Developer Experience

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com


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