IcedTea7 HEAD build error on RHEL 5 x86_64

[Andrew Haley]

On 09/26/2011 08:04 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On 10:23 Mon 26 Sep     , Andrew Haley wrote:
>> On 09/25/2011 11:58 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>>
>>> You can see why this is done in the Oracle environment where they
>>> want the binary to only depend on libc (even libstdc++ is statically
>>> linked), but we should make sure as much stuff works at
>>> *compile-time* as possible instead of waiting for users to hit
>>> failures at run-time.
>>
>> There is a counter-argument, though: Java itself doesn't depend on GUI
>> toolkits, but some Java programs do.  I don't think it's necessarily
>> true that every library that Java could possibly use in certain
>> application areas must be installed.  On the other hand, run-time
>> failures don't look good.
> 
> Well, we now have the option of either whereas before we were forced to
> look for pretty much everything at run-time.  There are, of course,
> different circumstances which necessitate a different mix of options.

Yes, we do, but this is another divergence from upstream that seems
to have a weak justification.  More build-time options are not good:
that's just more to maintain, and more complexity in IcedTea7.

> From a developer's perspective, I'd prefer to make use of the compiler
> and have it perform some checks at compile-time, rather than leaving
> everything to run-time as if I was using some interpreted language.

Perhaps, but "I'd prefer" isn't really a strong enough reason for
such a divergence.  Was this change ever discussed?

Andrew.