Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Kelly O'Hair]

These are not official product binaries but early access binary
snapshots, you can't expect these binaries to be perfect by any
means. They are also not OpenJDK7 builds but JDK7 builds.

It was decided that we needed to update our JDK7 Linux build
systems, so we had to do something to move out of the Dark Ages.
The Linux systems we have been using were setup for jdk1.4.2,
and used through jdk6. They were 2.4 kernel based systems.
To minimize our packaging effort an rpm based system made the
most sense, and Fedora9 seemed like the right choice at the time.
This could change, we can build on a variety of systems, but
jumping from ship to ship probably won't help matters without
understanding why things don't work.

We knew this was an experiment and we ran the risk of some Linux
systems not working, for a multitude of reasons.
And we also know that we cannot possible make everyone happy in
whatever we pick.

So what we need to do is figure out if there is a way to build
on Fedora9 that allows the product to work better on other systems,
or if we need to change to something other than Fedora9.

Constructive suggestions are welcome.

-kto

Martin Buchholz wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:27, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
>> As an example of the cost of building on old boxes, OpenJDK contains
>> prototypes for epoll(7) that are incorrect for some arches.  These
> 
> We are changing the subject slightly from portability of binaries
> to portability of sources.
> 
>> prototypes exist because epoll didn't come into existence before
>> Kernel 2.6(ish), and OpenJDK was being built on an old box, so the
>> prototypes were copied from the kernel headers on (I think) an x86
>> box.  This bug causes bizarre and hard to debug behaviour on non-x86
>> arches.
>>
>> At some point you have to get rid of cruft like this.  If not now,
>> when?
> 
> Obviously opinions differ on how long to support older platforms.
> 
> "Kids these days..." think 2 years is old.
> 
> When I was maintaining an open source project,
> I tried to maintain a portability horizon of at least 10 years.
> Seriously.  I would like people to be able to build my
> software on that old Irix machine they picked up at a
> garage sale.
> 
> For problems like changing prototypes, we have configure.
> 
> Sure the following example is ugly cruft,
> but we can wait one more decade before nuking it.
> 
> dnl If `getpgrp' takes no argument (the POSIX.1 version), define
> dnl `GETPGRP_VOID'.  Otherwise, it is the BSD version, which takes a
> dnl process ID as an argument.
> AC_CHECK_FUNCS(getpgrp)
> AC_FUNC_GETPGRP
> 
> Martin