On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Jan de Groot
As some people have noticed, I put a lot of effort in getting a free java runtime and SDK on archlinux, using GNU java, Eclipse-ecj and some other free tools, wrapped in java-gcj-compat.
The downside of this whole project is that it's stuck at java 5.0, the runtime isn't certified (the eclipse compiler is) and there's no more effort put into this project by redhat.
Since a while, there's an alternative to java-gcj-compat, called icedtea. This project is based on openjdk, with the difference that missing pieces of openjdk are filled in with parts from GNU classpath. One example is the webbrowser plugin, that has been missing from x86_64 since java's existence for this platform. The icedtea6 java environment passes sun's testsuite, making it a full blown GPL'ed java environment that is compatible with Sun's java. As it's developed by redhat, it also compiles fine with GCC 4.3, which we can't say about openjdk.
I would propose to package icedtea/openjdk for archlinux and make it the prefered java environment. Packaging this java environment requires a java compiler, our current free java platform is able to build icedtea/openjdk from source. This means that only java tools and packages required to build icedtea/openjdk will get built with gcj/ecj/java-gcj-compat, others will get built with icedtea/openjdk. Can't we bootstrap compile it the first time?
Making this switch means no official support for java-gcj-compat anymore. If something continues working with java-gcj-compat, it's nice, but if it doesn't, we don't consider it a bug.
Please let me know what your thoughts are about this change.
On the whole, sounds like a good idea to me. I know Arch used to have the idea that we preferred one tool for the job, and as long as we make it clear that our Java environment will be icedtea, we are picking one tool we will actively keep on top of. -Dan