any plans for a self extracting bin distribution?

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> Just wondering if there's any plans for a self extracting bin
> distribution like sun/oracle has. (Specifically for linux).
> 
> This is about the only reason I can't switch (or attempt to switch)
> from oracle-jdk to open-jdk.
> 
> The self extracting distributions are very very useful when you're
> running multiple versions of the jdk on the same machine or want to
> be able to swap between multiple version very quickly. The package
> installations like rpm/yum installations makes this extremely
> difficult.
> 

Have you looked at using something like rpm2targz on the rpms to turn
them into normal tarballs?

We don't have the resources to make binary releases as well as source,
and they would need to work across all distributions.  Distributions
already do a far better job of this.

Note that the Oracle binaries statically link just about every dependency,
so if a security issue occurs in something like libjpeg, zlib, libpng,
lcms, libstdc++, etc., you need a new binary.  The distro binaries, via
IcedTea, dynamically link to your system installation of these instead,
so any security updates to them instantly apply to the OpenJDK binaries
too.

> --
> Ted.
> 
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

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

PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EC5A 1F5E C0AD 1D15 8F1F  8F91 3B96 A578 248B DC07