At the request of the ServiceMesh folks, I've started working on integrating
the core Java infrastructure with EFS 3, and this creates some interesting
new problems.
First of all, I've been able to cleanly integrate the Oracle/Sun JRK/JRE
releases, which are very straight forward (basically just unpack the
distribution into the install tree). These can be downloaded form
openefs.org, by creating the "java" metaproj, and setting it up for download
in the same way as all the other metaprojs, and then running:
efs download release java sunjdk 6u23
efs download release java sunjre 6u23
Here I followed the metaproj/project convention we used in EFS 2, although
you could certainly argue that we should be maintaining the Oracle/Sun
binary only releases in the oracle metaproj. Table that for now....
The above integration required patching efsdeploy to support shell archives,
and build-specific macro expansion of the archive file pathname
I was about to start working on the IBM JDK/JRE, but these packages have a
particularly annoying dependency: compat-libstdc++. IBM's binaries depend
on the gcc 3.2.3 libstdc++, which is not part of the default RHEL5 builds.
Now, this is a problem, because I think we're playing with fire by
redistributing binaries from these vendors, which is why we need to have a
discussion about this.
First of all, you can't even download the Oracle/Sun *or* IBM Java
distributions without clicking your way through some licensing legalese.
This makes me particularly nervous about repackaging and redistributing
these binaries. The same is then true for the RHEL 5 binary rpms. You
need a RedHat login to get the official binaries, although we *could*
workaround this by simply building gnu/gcc/3.2.3 (and/or rhel/gcc/3.2.2) and
providing a natively compiled libstdc++ that can be used to satisfy the
requirements of the IBM Java products.
However, if we are going to package these products and share them via
openefs.org, I think we're asking for legal trouble, since we're effectively
redistributing these products, just packaged in a different way. We
certainly don't ask anyone to click through Oracle or IBM's license pages.
Before I go any further with the IBM Java products, I think we need to have
a discussion about the legal issue, since this is the first time we've
packaged something we did not compile from source code ourselves. I have
already completed the Oracle/Sun integration, and I'll go ahead and package
up some of the open source java products, but some of the other Java
infrastructure has similar issues. For example, JBoss -- can't download
that without a RedHat login, either, so while it's "open", it's not exactly
trivial to acquire.
Opinions? Feedback?
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