[7934] in testers
Re: Debathena beta
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Fri Mar 13 20:04:36 2009
Message-ID: <49BAF462.4050709@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:03:46 -0400
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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To: Rohan Agrawal <agrawalr@mit.edu>
CC: testers@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <1236979993.6496.12.camel@agrawalr-laptop>
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Hi Rohan -
Thanks for getting in touch.
Rohan Agrawal wrote:
>
> 1. Why has it been decided not to install acroread locally? I
> imagine many people would prefer it to evince, and running it
> from the locker is quite slow.
>
With Debathena, one of the major goals was to both avoid packaging
software ourselves that we don't maintain, and also to try and stay
inline with the upstream (in this case, Ubuntu) defaults as much as
possible.
We don't maintain acroread, obviously, and it's also currently not
available in the Ubuntu archive. It's encumbered license makes it
unlikely to show up in Ubuntu anytime soon. On the other hand, evince is
the Ubuntu default PDF reader, and that's where the focus of both Ubuntu
and GNOME development will be.
Are there specific things that you find lacking in evince? It may be
possible to encourage Ubuntu and GNOME developers to try and correct
those deficiencies.
> 2. I noticed that the java plugin installed is icedtea6-plugin,
> even though the sun jdk is installed. Why not use
> sun-java6-plugin to be consistent?
>
icedtea6-plugin is the Java plugin corresponding to OpenJDK, which is
Sun's re-release of the Java JDK under a Free license. It is, at this
point, almost entirely equivalent to the Sun JDK, and Debian/Ubuntu's
alternatives management system will prefer it over Sun JDK.
We recently made the decision to install OpenJDK as it also is
unencumbered by licensing issues. We're expecting to find that it can
function as a drop-in replacement for the Sun JDK, but if you find that
that's not the case, you should let us know.
> 3. The version of eclipse in intrepid (and jaunty) is very old, and
> it being installed was a bit confusing. Maybe just require that
> eclipse be run from the locker?
>
It seems that updating eclipse to version 3.4 in both Debian and Ubuntu
is more or less completely stalled at the moment (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=432350 and
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/123064). It seems
like gears are finally starting to turn, but I don't think it's going to
get updated for Jaunty.
In the mean time, while 3.2.2 is pretty old at this point, I suspect
there may be people who prefer the speed of running eclipse locally over
waiting for it to load out of a locker, but I'm not sure. It's
definitely something that we can discuss.
In the mean time, you can force the locker version by running "add -f
eclipse", which adds eclipse to the *f*ront of your path, instead of the
end.
- Evan
SIPB Debathena Team
