Installation questions

I'm reading the JPackage installation instructions at
http://www.jpackage.org/installation.php, and had two questions:

1. Those instructions are very emphatic about installing
jpackage-utils before installing a JDK. Why is this? If the JDK were
installed first, and then the utils package, what should I expect to
go wrong / not work?

2. It appears that the Sun -compat RPMs are severely out of date.
Sun's up to 1.6.0_20, while the FTP site linked from the instructions
(ftp://jpackage.hmdc.harvard.edu/JPackage/5.0/generic/RPMS.non-free/)
shows only 1.6.0.03 from 2008. That also appears to be the latest
version in the package browser
(http://www.jpackage.org/browser/rpm.php?jppversion=5.0&id=489).

A message on this list from last Friday
(https://www.zarb.org/pipermail/jpackage-discuss/2010-June/014125.html)
leads me to believe that the updated information exists somewhere, but
not in the project's actual repositories. Is there any other place I
could get those files?

I guess that also implies a post-installation question: if I get this
all sorted out, what would happen if Sun released a 1.6.0_21, and we
installed it? Should I expect that things would blow up if the -compat
package were not also upgraded? (I'm not really clear on how much
stuff that package actually installs, or if it's just a placeholder to
make the dependencies of other stuff resolve.)

Thanks,
Sixten