Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Andrew Haley]

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.