Marcus Better writes: > Andrew Haley wrote: > > In my opinion, Java libraries without stable interfaces shouldn't be > > deployed in free OSes. > > That's a nice goal but unfortunately the world is not so perfect, > because users occasionally require new software with shiny new > bells and whistles. Besides we cannot control upstream and prevent > them from breaking ABI. As a distribution we need to find a balance > between features and stability. > > I think the Java policy needs to be tweaked to allow for multiple > versions of the same library. The problem is much easier than for C > libraries, since we don't have a dynamic linker, so the user is > responsible for adding the correct library to the classpath. We > just need to make sure the different versions don't conflict, which > usually means that both of them cannot install the generic symlink > "/usr/share/java/foo.jar".
As I pointed out before, that doesn't work for Java in the general case because a single running VM can load multiple libraries, which come from different sources, which may need different versions of the same library. You're into dependency hell very quickly. > It seems it would suffice to have the symlink created by postinst, > which would point it at the latest installed version (similar to > ldconfig). > > Note that I'm not suggesting we should package several versions of > libraries. That should be avoided, but when necessary there should > be a way to do it. I'm not going to argue with that. Sometimes everybody has to do bad things. :-) Andrew. -- Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, UK Registered in England and Wales No. 3798903 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
