JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[fernando at lozano.eti.br]

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?


Sorta kidding -- see the ;-) ?

But isn't Red Hat kindgly giving time of some employees to work on IcedTea, and didn't they do the same for GCJ ?


>> 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.

Very reassuring. So it's only the work involved in checking each one of thousands specs.

I remember being bitten by this issue on OpenJDK 6 x Java 5. I even submitted a patch to Fedora Xerces package, so I could run Fedora provided ant with proprietary Sun JDK 5. Nice being able to say I had a small contribution for the wonderful distro which is Fedora. :-)


>> 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.

Thanks for the info.

So all F16 packages build with OpenJDK 6 are supposed to work with the also supplied GCJ ? Or didn't you tested so far ?


[]s, Fernando Lozano