JDK 7 status and IcedTea

[Andrew Haley]

On 11/29/2011 06:42 PM, fernando at lozano.eti.br wrote:

>>>>> 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 ?

Oh yeah.  I lead a whole team of people doing exactly that.  As soon
as we get the Java 7 TCK, we'll do the work.

>>> 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.

And also not wanting to break things for people using Java 6.

> 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. :-)

Excellent!

> So all F16 packages build with OpenJDK 6 are supposed to work with
> the also supplied GCJ ?

No, sorry.  Some do, some don't.

Andrew.