[3098] in Release_7.7_team
Java default version change
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Thu Jan 24 19:37:08 2002
Message-Id: <200201250037.TAA24813@dit.mit.edu>
To: tbelton@MIT.EDU
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 19:37:01 -0500
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
Hi,
I want to bump up the default Java version on Athena to a new release I
just installed, 1.3.1_02. This will affect which Java plugin Netscape sees
through the setting of the NPX_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable.
I did some testing and find that the previous problematic behavior on
Suns persists for Netscape 4.78: the plugin is sometimes seen to be
enabled, and sometimes not (as reported by the "about:plugins" URL). On
Linux, as before, the new plugin seems to work consistently in Netscape 4.78.
I wasn't easily able to test other Netscape versions due to the way
things are set up in the infoagents locker (which I can't edit).
If you want to do some testing, the path to the plugin to add to
NPX_PLUGIN_PATH is:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java_v1.3.1_02/distrib/${ATHENA_SYS}/jre/plugin/${ATHENA_SYS}/ns4
I propose changing the "current" link in the java locker on Monday- hopefully
you'll be around in case we run into problems. When that happens, if you
don't change the netscape.adjusted script, the new plugin will be used for
Linux, and also for the 4.61 Sun version of Netscape only (which seemed to work
OK with newer plugins before)- other versions of Sun Netscape will continue to
use the JDK 1.3.0 plugin as now.
One other difference is that I'm leaving in the Netscape 6.x versions
of the plugin for both platforms in the ns600 directory. When I did
this before, attempts to launch Netscape 4.x resulted in errors about
missing libraries and Netscape was essentially broken. I don't see these
errors now, when running from a modified version of netscape.adjusted,
but I'm concerned that they might come back if something is different
in the production configuration- if they do come back we'll need
to fix things in a hurry- I can just revert to deleting these directories
if necessary.
Finally, there is a Java plugin with the latest SGI 1.3.1 JDK- but the
configuration is very different from the Sun and Linux one and I think
we should just punt it, given all the problems we've had with Java plugins.
Alex
