Re: Switching default-java to OpenJDK7

[Florian Weimer <fweimer@bfk.de>]

* James Page:

> As OpenJDK7 and Oracle Java 7 are much closer in terms of
> codebase/compatibility than OpenJDK6/Sun Java 6 the consensus from the
> session was that this would be a good switch to make as this release of
> Ubuntu will be supported for 5 years.

Yes, that appears to be a good reason.  JDK 6 is EOLed in mid-2012, so
that's another concern.

OpenJDK 7 is also easier to build that OpenJDK 6.  (I'm not sure if this
applies to the IcedTea variants.)

> I have conducted a Ubuntu precise rebuild test with default-jdk switched
> to use openjdk-7 and at the moment there are around ~100 packages
> which fail to build from source (see [1]).

> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=java7-ftbfs

I get an "Error ID: OOPS-313e91354c2b7ac8927a9e63d54ff035".

What I've noticed so far are tools which cannot parse the rt.jar from
OpenJDK 7.

> Is anyone in the team making Java 7 transition plans for Debian?  Or
> indeed does anyone have any opinion on whether this release of Debian is
> the right point in time to switch default-java to openjdk-7?

wheezy will be released after mid-2012, so the Java 7 transition is
pretty much a unavoidable.

-- 
Florian Weimer                <fweimer@bfk.de>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
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