Open-Source environments for Java (was: Re: java)

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Do you really need proper Java from Sun/IBM?

If not, then you can use one of the OpenSource offerings already in
testing/sarge (including sablevm, kaffe, GNU classpath, jikes, among
others).

You can have a reasonably good development system if you install the
package free-java-sdk. It *won't* be as one of the private, non-free
implementations, but they are available for many platforms and it consists
only of Free Software.

In fact, the maintainers of the packages are quite responsive, since they
want to get more and more Java packages in main (instead of having them
only in contrib, which is not part of the distribution).

And not only are the maintainers responsive, but also the upstream
developers working quite fast on improving their systems (especially,
classpath, which is shared in one way or another among the free virtual
machines).

I would say that the Java team in Debian is one of the most responsive,
together with the teTeX maintainers and the core Gnome team (I'm excluding
here infra-structure teams like debian-installer -- these guys are heroes).


Hope this helps, Rogério.


P.S.: Unfortunately, I feel that I can't say the same about some other
developers in Debian, that should be "pinged" to see if they are still
interested in the project.

In my very humble and uninformed opinion, some maintainers should really
give up maintaining their packages or should try to get other people as
co-maintainers, if they lack the time to fix their packages. :-(

If they applied to the project, then, they committed themselves to some
responsibilities and even though the project is mostly driven by
volunteers, if they can't keep up with their committments, then they should
politely be asked to give space to other people. And I can tell you that
there are other people interested in *working* for the project.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/