changing the java default to java7, and dropping java support for some architectures
It's time to change the Java default to java7, and to drop java support on
architectures with non-working java7.
Patches for the transition to Java7 should be available in the BTS, mostly
submitted by James Page. Some may be still lurking around as diffs in Ubuntu
packages, apologies for that. There are a few cases, where Java7 is not yet an
alternative to Java6, so the transition should not be blocked on these missing
bits. However it should be clear that this is an interim solution, and OpenJDK 6
will be removed for jessie.
Currently java bindings/packages are built for all architectures, however some
architectures still use gcj as the (only available) Java implementation, and
some OpenJDK zero ports are non-functional at this point, and Debian porters
usually don't care about that. So the architectures to drop java support would be
kfreebsd-any, hurd-i386, mips, mipsel, s390, ia64
- kfreebsd may gain java 7 support at some time, however this shouldn't
be relied on yet.
- hurd never had openjdk support, and afaik, nobody is working on that.
- openjdk support for mips and mipsel is currently broken, with several
requests for help on debian-mips left unanswered.
- I fixed openjdk on s390 for the release, however this architecture is
time comsuming to maintain, and again no answers on debian-s390 asking
for help.
- same experience on ia64, however the zero ports seems to work there.
The list of java archs is a bit changing, and to avoid hardcoding this list into
every source package, I propose to something similiar like done for the gcj
architectures (/usr/share/gcj/debian_defaults). Let the packages be still
architecture any, and decide whether to build arch dependent packages on a make
macro java_archs.
Build dependencies would still need hard-coding of the architecture list, so
another idea would be to keep the default-{jre,jdk} packages on all
architectures and only use them if the architecture is found in java_archs.
Matthias
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