JRE install bundles for 6u10 are non-executable

[Volker Simonis]

Hi Martin,

this is a known problem and it it noticed at the top of the download
page at http://download.java.net/jdk6/ :

"If you choose to download and install self-extracting JRE or DEBUG
Jar bundles then you need to change the file permission to be
executable in the bin directory after the installation."

I think this is because of a long standing problem which doesn't allow
the Java zip-classes to create executable files on *nix (i.e. there's
no standard Java API which allows the manipulation of file access
permissions on *nix except setting the read-only bit).

Without telling names I know of Java-implementations which by default
create all the files created from within Java with the executable bit
set - but I think that's by far not the most elegant solution. In my
opinion it would be better to finally extend the Java File API to at
least support the basic *nix file access permissions.

You can have a look at bug 6194856 ("Zip Files lose ALL ownership and
permissions of the files") and all the related  bugs (which mostly
have been reported against 1.3). They finally all bail down to the
file accesss permission problem...

Regards,
Volker



On 7/30/08, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com> wrote:
> I installed the Linux JREs for 6u10 b28,
> (using java -jar jre......jar)
> and was surprised to discover none of the
> programs (like "bin/java") were executable.
> I checked earlier 6u10 builds,
> and they have the same problem.
> I suspect the jdk7 builds also have this problem.
>
> This seems like a P1 deployment bug.
> Hasn't anyone ever run sanity checks
> on JREs installed this way?
>
> Martin
>