Re: [PROPOSAL] New Virtual Packages and way to handle Classpath
Hallo Jan,
--- Jan Schulz <jasc.usenet@gmx.de> wrote:
> >B. It doesn't matter what proprietary software provides. This is Debian.
>
> Yes. And we should at least make this situation for our users as easy
> as possible. The situation now is IMO not.
part of the problem is that the free vms are not covering everything from jdk,
but the other, much greater part of the problem is application writers who
assume that the whole world uses sun's jdk. Thus they muck around with
$JAVA_HOME, try to load sun.* classes, try to put a non-existant
$JAVA_HOME/jre/tools.jar in their CLASSPATH, and so on.
When I posted a bug report to ant developers once why their CVS bootstrap
script sucked so much on free java environments and whether they would like to
fix it, the answer was basically: go away, it works for us.
So for example you'll se a lot of broken build.xml files, that assume the java
compiler is greedy, and automatically tracks down files needs to compile a
class if they don't appear on the command line. Well, surprise, kaffe's java
compiler, kjc, does not, and there is no spec saying a compiler needs to do it.
> I haven't done it, but this is IMO the way how someone would install
> Tomcat on a debian server:
> apt-get install apache
> apt-get install tomcat4 # does not work, as there is no j2sdk in debian
> # two ways: get BD packages, which are outdated by almost a year and
> # beta. Or use equies and a -bin downlaod. Or, worst: install BD and
> # then get a -bin download and hack the /etc/default/tomcat4
> apt-get install tomcat4
>
> Similar things for the browser plugins.
there are no free software java browser plugins (yet). Kaffe has a rotten
implementation with unknown status, Michael Koch is working on one for gcj, and
japhar also had something a few years ago. But you don't want to include a free
java plugin without being reasonable sure tha the underlying VM is secure
enough. Kaffe and gcj are both getting a verifier implementation at the moment,
which is just the first step. The second step is a permission based security
architecture, with policy files, code signing and all that. There is no such
thing in the free software java world (yet). Glasspath has laid some
foundations , though.
cheers,
dalibor topic
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