----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Rydahl Andersen" <manderse(a)redhat.com>
To: "Aleksandar Kurtakov" <akurtako(a)redhat.com>
Cc: java-devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 10:18:00 AM
Subject: Re: [fedora-java] Eclipse Luna on Fedora 21 and JDK 8 requirement
>>>
>>> Fedora 20 used to have 3 different Java versions (5, 7, 8).
>>
>> ok, why no Java 6 ?
>
> Besides many technical reason the biggest one is non-technical in my
> eyes - no one volunteered to do it. You know it's always a matter of
> "who will do the work?". I'm pretty sure that if someone jumps in and
> say "Hey, I'll maintain Java 6, fix problems/adopt Java 6 to changes
> in the OS if neeeded, help strengthen the switching between JREs, go
> through the Java projects(shipped in Fedora) and help them properly
> set their targets in build scripts so builds properly work on Java 6
> and etc" there will be no objection to having Java 6. :)
Fair enough.
>>> OpenJDK 7
>>> was removed from F21 because its support will end before F21 EOL and
>>> we
>>> don't want to ship software not supported by upstream.
>>
>> So for users most stable thing is to use Oracle JDK builds instead
>> which
>> are and will stay available ?
>
> Users can still try to use it but it's something that they have to do
> on their own - download, extract, set PATH, etc. Just like on every
> platform with Oracle JVM.
Yeah, this is similar experience for developers on all other platforms
so its expected/assumed.
>> No separate repo with "binaries that is currently supported but will
>> not
>> stay supported for all of fedora 21 lifetime" ?
>
> 1. Fedora can not legally redistribute Oracle JDK.
I know - hence why I would think having a openjdk 7 build would make
sense.
> 2. Fedora can not distribute something that Fedora developers can not
> support if there is a problem in it (as it is with Oracle JDK).
so *any* package that is known to be marked as EOL sometime in the
future before the upcoming Fedora EOL's gets removed from that future
Fedora release ? Even that Java 7 is still the most used and targeted
Java version ?
How does fedora handle it when a package stops being maintained
midstream with not proper warning ? Do they get removed or just lets
getting be stale ?
If removed - why couldn't that be done for Java7 ?
If just letting get stale - why couldn't that be done for Java7 ?
And I assume the answers is you just don't have time/power to maintain
it and thats is fully grokkable - but then
it seems to me it would be good for users if we at least explain how
they can use another Java 7 in fedora eclipse context (which was the
initial question here)
Thus is the answer to that to tell users to have their custom
eclipse.ini pointing at the oracle JDK 7 and then
launch eclipse pointing to the vm ?
Like 'eclipse --launcher.ini <ini.location>'
As described in
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse.ini and
http://help.eclipse.org/indigo/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.do...
or is there any known problems with that ?
The problem is that eclipse uses third party libraries (xml-commons, xerces,
apache-commons*, jetty, batik, etc.) and many Java projects do not care to set their
target bytecode in the build scripts. This results in if some of this projects ends up
being rebuild with Java 8 it might start using Java 8 bytecode resulting in some parts of
Eclipse not working or even not starting at all. I'm not staying that this is
constantly a problem but it is something that has to be monitored and kept track of if we
are going to tell users they can try that. And this is something that again no one with
interest towards Oracle JDK 7 (my team has zero such interest) has committed to maintain.
That's the main reason from my side to not care about Oracle JDK - it needs resources
which I can better spend on fixing real issues.
Alex