IcedTea7 HEAD build error on RHEL 5 x86_64

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

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.

>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.
In that sense, you can think of it like having -Werror on for
development and off for release.  FWIW, enabling use of the proper
Gtk+ headers has already thrown up a number of warnings about type
mismatches.

That doesn't mean distros have to depend on everything.  With binary
distros, you also have the option to separate libraries into different
packages.  I believe Debian does this to provide a minimal headless
install.
 
It's not like there's a standard policy for this now.  It's probably
less likely that you'll use sound than a GUI toolkit, yet ALSA is
required at compile-time.  Likewise, the X libraries are required at
compile-time. Gtk+ is not much on top of that and it's needed by the
plugin anyway.

> We don't want to be in a situation where as soon as OpenJDK provides
> an API for Library X, every user of OpenJDK is forced to install
> Library X to satisfy dependencies.
> 

There's no forcing going on.  If you don't want, say Gtk+ at
compile-time, you can --disable-system-gtk and take the risk that the
Gtk look and feel won't work.

> I don't think there is any simple answer.
> 
> Andrew.

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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