F22 System Wide Change: Legacy implementations of the Java platform in Fedora

[Deepak Bhole]

* Mikolaj Izdebski <mizdebsk at redhat.com> [2015-02-24 09:58]:
> On 02/24/2015 03:32 PM, Deepak Bhole wrote:
> > * Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at greysector.net> [2015-02-24 09:29]:
> >> On Tuesday, 24 February 2015 at 15:09, Deepak Bhole wrote:
> >>> * Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at greysector.net> [2015-02-24 09:04]:
> >>>> On Tuesday, 24 February 2015 at 14:28, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> >>>> [...]
> >>>>> There were several attempts in past like "can you please support jdk
> >>>>> 7,6...in newer fedoras" and we always told no. When come speech about "do it
> >>>>> on your own" suddenly many questions marks raised up.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The last open bug is: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1190137
> >>>>> the guy is willing to maintain it.
> >>>>
> >>>> Fine, so let him do it and drop the Obsoletes: tag in java-1.8.0-openjdk
> >>>> and its successors. You shouldn't arbitrarily block people from
> >>>> re-introducing an older branch of any package back into Fedora in the
> >>>> first place.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> We have no intention of blocking it. The reason for proposing these
> >>> restrictions is that the Fedora Java stack will not work with older
> >>> JDKs, therefore we need to make sure that it goes not get installed on
> >>> the system unless explicitly requested by someone who knows what they
> >>> are doing.
> >>
> >> Well, you do that by adding/updating (Build)Requires: in the packages
> >> which won't work otherwise, not by adding Obsoletes:.
> >>
> > 
> > That would generally work for most packages, but there is a new JDK
> > released every 2 years. This means that we would have to change the BR
> > and Requires for the entire Java stack (100s and 100s of packages) every
> > 2 years, which is non-trivial.
> 
> First, we have versioned auto-requires generated during package build.
> Explicit requires on java aren't usually needed. If package requires
> "java > 1:1.7" then it is correct - the package can be assumed to work
> with older JDK.
> 

While that is true in terms of source compatibility, it will work only
if it is compiled with the older JDK.

> Secondly, it is fairly easy to add requires on "java-devel >= 1:1.8" to
> packages related to build systems like ant, maven or gradle. This would
> cover most cases of building Java packages using latest JDK.
> 

As you stated, it will cover most cases, but not all. More critically,
this does not solve the issue with requirement of 'java' itself.

Deepak

> -- 
> Mikolaj Izdebski
> Software Engineer, Red Hat
> IRC: mizdebsk
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