How to install OpenJDK6 on F17

[Andrew Haley]

On 05/31/2012 09:33 PM, Fernando Lozano wrote:

>> > OpenJDK6 will no longer get security updates after November 2012: 
>> > http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2012-February/002514.html 
>> > A large part of the problem is that we will not have access to all the 
>> > security vulnerability information as it is not made public. That will 
>> > make it very difficult to fix the underlying issues. I am guessing 
>> > that a lot of people who will use the Oracle JDK6 beyond the EOL date 
>> > will probably run the version last available before EOL. We cannot 
>> > ship such insecure versions in Fedora though.

> I don't understand why Oracle JDK EOF affects OpenJDK. I suppose code is 
> commited to OpenJDK and then moved to Oracle JDK as with most sane open 
> source projects with a commercial edition. Am I wrong, and Oracle 
> developers their JDK at closed doors, and later pushes their patches to 
> OpenJDK?

Yes, you are.

> And couldn't / shouldn't OpenJDK have its own bug track system, and 
> should't it be the primary one, instead of the Oracle bug tracking?

Yes, and that is going to happen, but it's a longer-term goal.  But
in any case, I would be opposed to Fedora doing long-term support on
an obsolete version of Java.  It really isn't Fedora's mission.  Fedora
is all about producing a first-class distro based on the latest software.

> But even using your rationale, why GCJ, which is Java 5, is still in 
> Fedora 17?

Because it's still useful, and its upstream is not dead.

Andrew.