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

[Mario Torre]

On Tue, 2015-02-24 at 15:19 +0100, Jiri Vanek wrote:
> On 02/24/2015 02:58 PM, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > 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 can not do it. It will keep legacy jdks in users system. We don't wont  99% of users to keep 
> (unwillingly and unknowingly) old jdks. 99% of users is hepy with one - main - jdk. To provide new 
> jdk , we have to obsolate old jdk...
> 
> If you have workaround for this, please share. (Sewerin already higlighted it on devel discussion).
> 

I'm not an expert so probably I'm saying something wrong, but can't we
have -compact packages like we do with other libraries, and then handle
the compact libraries similarly to what the kernel does (that is, older
version are not wiped)?

Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but this seems to me like being drunk
while still having the barrel full :)

Cheers,
Mario