Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 23/11/2008, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 17:31, Andrew John Hughes
>  <gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>
>  > Well F10 is out on Tuesday so choosing F9 seems strange...
>
>
> Andrew, you appear to live in a different world from the rest of us.
>  Operating systems generally try to be backward compatible,
>  so from my point of view using Fedora 9 seems offhand very aggressive.
>  My rule of thumb was to build production binaries on the oldest
>  systems you are willing to support.  What developers should use is
>  a different story.
>

Not really.  If you're saying you want the oldest system while still
maintaining reasonably close to the majority of systems in general
use, then yes I agree F9 is aggressive, as I'd like to know the build
isn't going to be unknowingly broken in really bad ways on current
Debian stable or RHEL 4/5, both of which are much older (though Debian
stable will soon become a more recent release).

 I was reading it as where do we want to do test builds to ensure we
catch the new issues that are going to arise.  Apparently there are
already issues building with the new Ubuntu release due to a
backported gcc 4.4 patch, but I haven't been able to verify this as I
don't have software installed that is so bleeding edge ;)

I don't see why anyone other than developers or prospective developers
would be building OpenJDK.  Actual users would find it much easier
just using the package for their distro and you'll find one in Fedora,
Ubuntu, Debian and (with some work) RHEL and Gentoo.

>
>  > But I don't get the point of this mail anyway.  OpenJDK already builds
>  > fine on F9 and F10 for me.
>
>
> It is of great interest to me.  In future, if my build is broken,
>  I will first ask, "How is my system different from Fedora 9?".
>
>

Then should we be posting successful build testimonials here? Would
that help? My own builds and blogs I've seen by others suggest builds
on a variety of GNU/Linux platforms over and above just F9.

>  Martin
>

-- 
Andrew :-)

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