[7945] in testers
Re: Debathena beta
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Khusid)
Sat Mar 14 12:50:29 2009
Message-ID: <49BBE00F.3040300@mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:49:19 -0400
From: Mike Khusid <mkhusid@MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Rohan Agrawal <agrawalr@mit.edu>
CC: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>, testers@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <1237049159.19781.14.camel@agrawalr-laptop>
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Considering acroread was provided in Athena 9, it got to be available
under the same terms for other Linux distros. It's the same product,
after all. I doubt Medibuntu packaging changes the license terms in any
way. But I am not expert on software licensing.
Mike
Rohan Agrawal wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Thanks for the response.
>
> Regarding acroread, I know it exists in medibuntu, so if there aren't
> legal issues with using medibuntu, it wouldn't be more work to have
> acroread installed. Aside from just having a much more polished feel
> than evince, I think acroread's printing options (specifying the lpr
> command, multiple pages per sheet, etc) are very nice. I understand
> that there might be license issues with using medibuntu though.
>
> About the java plugin, I don't have any problem with openjdk. My
> comment was more about consistency - the computer I used had the sun
> jdk, but the icedtea plugin, and thus the openjdk jre. I figured it
> should either be sun jdk and sun plugin, or openjdk and icedtea plugin.
>
> Thanks,
> Rohan
>
> On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 20:03 -0400, Evan Broder wrote:
>> 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
>>
