It makes me wonder whether there should be a .deb/.rpm for *building*
OpenJDK that causes all the right versions of all the necessary
software to be installed.
-- Jon
On Jun 19, 2008, at 5:41 PM, David Herron wrote:
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
