[1495] in athena10
Re: Replace Sun Java with OpenJDK? [Re: Updates to debathena-thirdparty]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Tue Mar 10 17:32:05 2009
Cc: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>, Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>,
debathena@mit.edu
Message-Id: <1D2CEC57-BFD6-4835-A348-92BF3CF47A6B@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0903101704120.15595@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:31:06 -0400
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On Mar 10, 2009, at 5:23 PM, Anders Kaseorg wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Mar 2009, Alex T Prengel wrote:
>> so should we make the latter the default on cluster machines instead?
>
> Can we consider moving to OpenJDK by default instead of Sun Java?
> (Packages openjdk-6-* instead of sun-java6-*.)
If OpenJDK actually works, I would be fine with this. This seems like
a particularly good time to try it and find out what breaks, and if we
need to switch back to sun-java6 by default for the summer, we can.
However, I will defer to Alex on this, since he knows more about the
various requirements of packages. I know that some vendors, for
example, want you to run one specific JRE, and will tell you to go
away if you're not using the one they want.
> It is possible to install both openjdk-6-* and sun-java6-*; I don’t
> care
> so much about the latter being present, but I would still advocate
> making
> (leaving) OpenJDK the default.
I would advocate for installing sun-java6 as well. In addition to
what I described above, plenty of users explicitly want Sun Java,
whether they need it or not. I suspect much of that is due to bad
experiences with GNU "Java", but still, it would probably be good if
it was there.
-Jon
