On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Aleksandar Kurtakov <akurtako@redhat.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christopher" <ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org>
> To: "Sudhir Khanger" <ml@sudhirkhanger.com>
> Cc: "Fedora Java Development List" <java-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2014 6:43:17 AM
> Subject: Re: [fedora-java] Eclipse Luna on Fedora 21 and JDK 8 requirement
>
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 12:28 AM, Sudhir Khanger < ml@sudhirkhanger.com >
> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 5:06 AM, Christopher < ctubbsii-fedora@apache.org >
> wrote:
> > to warrant the pursuit of -target 1.7 in its build
>
> Would it have caused technical problems to have included both 1.7 or
> 1.8 as targets?
>
>
> Either I'm not understanding you, or you're not understanding the problem.
> F21 could have built as -target 1.7 and run on the provided Java 8 JVM, but
> also could have run under a user-specified Java 7 JVM (assuming there
> weren't any bootstrap classpath problems that would have prevented such a
> build, which there are... but it may not matter for Eclipse and its
> dependencies). I can't imagine there would be any reason to build Eclipse
> for both, unless Eclipse itself has some internal restriction that prevents
> it from building projects using Java 8, when itself was built with Java 7.
> The fact that there isn't a 1.7 JDK to build against properly, to address
> the bootstrap classpath problem, is not a technical problem, so much as a
> policy that prevented OpenJDK7 from being packaged alongside OpenJDK8 in
> F21.

Well, it's neither technical nor policy problem - it's resources problem. There is no policy stating that there can be only OpenJDK8. As soon as people join in with the ongoing maintenance of both upstream and downstream OpenJDK 7 the problem would be solved.

The explanation I've seen multiple times now is that there was a decision to explicitly exclude OpenJDK7 from F21, because Oracle has Java 7 scheduled for EOL during the window of time where F21 is expected to be supported. That sounds very much like policy. Both OpenJDK7 and OpenJDK8 lived side-by-side in F20 perfectly fine. It actually took effort to make OpenJDK8 obsolete OpenJDK7, instead of just switching the default. I don't know which would have taken greater effort, but it did sound to me like a policy-based decision to do one vs. the other. It may only be a OpenJDK package maintainer policy, not a Fedora or FESCo policy, though.
 

>
> Even if you could build Eclipse targetted for 1.7, I'm not sure there's any
> point, except to support running an older JRE that the user manually
> downloaded. I'm not sure it should be a goal that Fedora's packages be built
> to run on top of VMs that are older than the ones provided... that seems
> nonsensical. Developing *for* those older VMs, sure, but not running the
> build tools, like Eclipse, on them. It just seems like a completely
> pointless endeavor.

Well, I think this is perfectly doable now. Install your own Java 7, add it as Installe JRE, target it with your project. Is there something I miss ?

Yes, building other projects against 7, within Eclipse, is doable, now which is why I said I thought it was a pointless endeavor to rebuild Eclipse such that it would run on Java 7. The only reason it might not be pointless is if there are plugins that won't work in Eclipse if Eclipse isn't running on 7... and somebody pointed out that that may be the case... though I certainly wouldn't expect that to be the case with any Eclipse plugins provided in Fedora.
 
Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team

>
> --
> Christopher L Tubbs II
> http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii
>
>