Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/11/24 Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> Martin Buchholz wrote:
>
>> Sun has historically provided binaries as their primary deliverable,
>> and continues to operate the "business" side of JDK development in
>> that way.  The problem of building a binary distribution that will
>> run well on as many systems in actual use as possible is a different
>> (and probably, harder) problem than what distro maintainers do,
>> which is to always take source, never binaries, from upstream, and
>> build binaries designed only to ever run on the same system they
>> were built on.  A packager at a company might want to use Sun's
>> approach, and build one set of supported binaries that will work on
>> a relatively disparate set of target machines within the company.
>>
>> Another way of looking at it - it's a (Sun) bug if Sun-built Fedora
>> 9 binaries fail to run well on Ubuntu dapper, whereas I doubt that
>> the Fedora community itself is aiming for that kind of
>> compatibility.
>
> Indeed not.
>
> Fedora 9 is a good choice.  The main issues when building OpenJDK on
> newer GNU/Linux systems are to do with the C++ compiler, which has
> changed very significantly since Red Hat AS 2.1 and SUSE 8.  In
> particular, standard conformance is much closer and optimization more
> aggressive.  Some previous releases of OpenJDK would not compile on
> Fedora 9's compiler and contained bugs that would compile but would
> fail in obscure ways.
>
> I think you'll be fine: my only concern would be whether a (statically
> linked) recent version of libstdc++ has any dependencies on a newer
> libc.
>
> Andrew.
>

I think F9 may have been a little too big a leap, given the complaints
today.  Something around the age of RHEL5/Debian stable might have
been a better choice.

That said, I'm not a consumer of these proprietary binaries :)

Using the source and IcedTea7:

$ ~/build/icedtea/bin/java -version
java version "1.7.0_0"
IcedTea 1.9-pre-rd9eec6614be5 Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_0-b42)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.0-b09, mixed mode)

So I'm happy.

--
Andrew :-)

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