Re: What should go in JPP6, and what as update to JPP5? When is support for RHEL versions dropped?

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Oded Arbel <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 11:48 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Jason Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > RHEL 6 is off-topic for this list, but I'd like to know just as much
>> > as you would. ;-) As far as 6.0 is concerned, my personal vote would
>> > be to make RHEL 5 the lone supported release
>>
>> I agree with supporting RHEL 5.
>
> I would also very much like to see RHEL 5 supported in JPackage 6.
> currently a lot of the packages in JPP6 cannot be installed on RHEL 5
> due to RPM version incompatibilities. As my company is using RHEL 5 and
> CentOS 5 servers, supporting these platforms is a major priority for us.

In the short term, I've published some hooks for this on this mailing
list. The summary of the RHEL 5 compatibility issues of JPP5 is below:

* JPackage often uses ".noarch" packages rather than .i386/x86_64.
This causes serious confusion when there is an old .i386 version in
RHEL 5, a new noarch one from JPackagae, and yum tries to grab and
install the .i386 version as well as the .noarch from JPackage. The
easy solution is to put entries like these ' in your yum.conf.

       exclude=ant.i386
       exclude=tomcat5.i386

Hmm. This list would be good to publish.

* RHEL 5 obsoleted the 'ecj' package with 'eclipse-ecj'. This causes
nuttiness, unless you provide an eclipse-ecj of a higher version
number to displace the RHEL 5 one and eliminate the 'Obsoletes': that
will allow the installation of JPackage ecj, and satisfy eclipse-ecj
dependencies. I'm happy to send you a copy of my placeholder .spec
file for this

* The java-1.6.0-sun and java-1.6.0-sun-compat packages are seriously
out of date. Again, I'm happy to send you the copies of my .spec
files.

In fact, I'd be willing to maintain those now.