JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[Andrew Haley]

On 11/29/2011 03:33 PM, fernando at lozano.eti.br wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>> If I am, is there a timeframe for certified builds?
>>
>> No.
> 
> :-(
> 
> Please, Red Hat, drop a few bucks for this! ;-)

What has Red Hat's bucks got to do with this?

>>> And while we're talking about Java 7, I heard about serious problems
>>> preventing some open source packages like Lucene from running under
>>> Java 7 on production settings.
>>
>> That is ancient history.  This bug was fixed almost instantly in
>> IcedTea devel, and no release was ever shipped with this bug either.
> 
> But someone told about incompatibilities on Fedora Java packages
> that prevented OpenJDK 7 / IcedTea 2 from being the default Java in
> F16.

It was too early, really.  The worst problem is that packages compiled
with Java 7 don't run on Java 6.  This is by design: by default
compiled classes are marked as being runnable on a 7+ virtual machine
only.  So, once you compile Fedora packages with Java 7 there's no
going back.

> So I can expect OpenJDK 7 to be the default Java when F17 is
> released?

I certainly hope so.  That's the plan.

> PS: I am writing an aticle about open source java jvms, it looks
> like GNU Classpath, GCJ, JamVM, CacaoVM, Kafee are dead, although
> not officially like Apache Harmony. Anyone can comment on this,
> mayne on a new thread?

We're still using gcj, but it's not being worked on very much.  It's
still closer to Java 1.5 than anything else.  JamVM and Cacao are
very much alive.

Andrew.