David Holmes - Sun Microsystems wrote:
Andrew,
Andrew John Hughes said the following on 06/20/08 09:35:
I would hope one of the side effects of moving the JDK from a
proprietary to a community-based Free Software model would be that it
gets built, run and tested on a much wider range of platforms and
compilers. This has already started to happen.
Agreed - this is a good end goal. Meanwhile there are some
practicalities to address.
The reality is that people aren't going to download and build a
specific copy of GCC just for OpenJDK, and distros will certainly want
it to build with the GCC they use for everything else.
But are the Distros expecting/assuming that everything will work fine
with their version of GCC? Who is expected to have done the testing?
If something goes wrong who would be expected to fix it? Would the
Distros patch the OpenJDK code with a workaround for their GCC
version? Or would they grab a known working GCC version and rebuild
using that?
Right now the reality is that these alternate compiler versions have
not undergone extensive testing for the OpenJDK. Over time that will
hopefully change, but for now - caveat emptor!
Cheers,
David Holmes
Ubuntu ships with a default GCC but you can also install other GCC's
/usr/bin/gcc versus /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 versus /usr/bin/gcc-3.4 etc
It doesn't seem very onerous (on Ubuntu) for the end user to do this.
I'd think other distros also do this. I have no idea how onerous it is
for the distros to provide this service.
-- David Herron
