Re: What is the right Java upgrade path for RHEL 5 users?

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 12:55 AM, David Walluck <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 02/20/2011 08:39 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> Given that Oracle bought Sun, that RHEL 5 is getting long in the
>> tooth, and that JPackage 6 is out, what should I be telling RHEL 5
>> users who want access to recent Java packages? With the .spec files
>> I've occasionally published for RHEL 5 plugins and the java-sun-*
>
> I don't understand the relationship between Oracle buying Sun and RHEL 5
> (which is  a product of neither of these two companies). If you're
> talking about the Oracle JDK RPMS not being kept up to date in JPackage,
> this may be so, but it's not due to Oracle.

The changes are confusing the use and requirements for the Sun
published JRE's and JDK's. If the OpenJDK tools work well for building
managing those, great. Getting developers off of Sun's, I mean
Oracle's, JDK's and JRE's is not a trivial political matter, even if
OpenJDK is completely compatible. This doesn't solve the issue for
RHEL 5, which has legacy access to the Sun components in RHEL's
"supplementary" channel.

> Keep in mind that JPackage builds on CentOS 5, which is compatible with
> RHEL 5. Moreover, since CentOS ships with the open source openjdk,
> there's really no need to use the Oracle prorietary JDK any longer. The

This cannot be completely true. I just checked, and a lot of the
Jpackage 6.0 SRPM's, for example, fail miserably to install on RHEL 5
or CentOS 5 because they were built with too recent a version of RPM
and have the MD5sum incompatibility with the older RPM software on
RHEL 5 and CentOS 5. I have to assume that they were built either on
RHEL 6 or a recent Fedora, or in a "mock" chroot cage for RHEL 6 or
Fedora.

That, or you've upgraded the RPM in your CentOS 5 environment. If
you've done so, I'd appreciate your notes on doing so, because when I
tried it I ran into dependency hell.

Also, RedHat publishes various "Sun" JDK plugins themselves as part of
their "supplementary" repository, that CentOS does not do for various
reasons. The conflicts in package management and integration are
painful and ongoing. JPackages access to these in better RPM
compatible format is useful. (It's why I published some .spec files
for those packages.)

> fact that the Oracle JDK is non-free and not included in CentOS makes it
> more difficult to use vs. simply using the provided openjdk.

Yeah, I can see that as sensible for RHEL 6. Unfortunately, it's not
very workable for RHEL 5.