Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Martin Buchholz]

Andrew,

I think we still have a mismatch of expectations.
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.

Your suggestion of advertising test build successes is a good one.
For the record, I have been and will continue to build all releases
of openjdk6 and openjdk7 on Ubuntu dapper, and will attempt
to fix (or report) any failures doing so.

Martin

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 00:41, Andrew John Hughes
<gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:

> 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.