GCJ [was: pdftk retired?]

[Andrew Haley]

On 03/19/2014 10:59 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On 03/08/2014 03:37 AM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>>> On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Sorry I am missing something. Why can't we keep the old pdftk that
>>>>> works with itext2?
>>>>
>>>> Check the whole thread - because of GCJ dependency. iText is second
>>>> issue. The first could be fixed by rewrite of offending part of code
>>>> to Java but someone would have to do it first. That's how I understand
>>>> this situation.
>>>>
>>>
>>> The only things I read in the thread are "GCJ is abandoned" and "we
>>> really want to get rid of GCJ". Am I supposed to come to the
>>> conclusion that the GCJ package is dropped from Fedora? If so, where
>>> is this decision made? Why was it made without consulting GCJ users?
>>
>> The problem is more to do with upstream maintainership.  If GCJ is to
>> be used in the future it needs to be updated to a current version of
>> the Java class library, but that's a lot of work.  GCJ is still a
>> pretty good compiler for the Java language, but it's stuck at JDK5
>> (ish).
> 
> And JDK5 might be good enough for the use required. It doesn't claim
> to be anything more than that, so I don't see the harm in leaving it there.

Speaking as the upstream maintainer, I do.

Andrew.