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Java Fallout: OO.o 2.0 and the FOSS Community
Joe Barr writes "Bruce Byfield has an interesting look at the 'fallout' between OpenOffice.org and the free/open source software communities because of their reliance on Java in the latest release. As he says, "It seems a decision based largely on practical considerations -- and with a disregard for the consequences for both the rest of the free and open source software (FOSS) communities and the future of OpenOffice.org itself." This is an issue that is not going away."
I think the article makes some interesting points, such as:
Some might argue against Schönheit's characterization of C++ as complex or Java as being not slow. However, technical arguments are in many ways beside the point.
What I got out of it is that the Java environment makes it far easier to add features to the current OO. From the article:
Java allows more rapid development of components for OpenOffice.org, without struggling with the complexity of OpenOffice.org's C++ build environment. People complain about releases not being quick enough and when Java is used to make the build environment less complicated, people bitch about it not being open source. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Linux already has basically everything you need to build packages that way. The key thing is that Linux already has a way to specify where to find libraries relative to the binary that is trying to load them. Most people who build software for Linux don't know this and stupidly build hard-coded paths into executables and make you change your /etc/ld.so.conf to include
every directory on the planet, but in
reality this is a total waste of time
since $ORIGIN is available and
makes this issue totally go away.
Basically, $ORIGIN works like this: when you build the binary and link against the libraries it need, you can put something like -z origin -rpath '$ORIGIN/../lib' on the ld command line. (Note that the dollar sign is quoted and is intended to go into the executable file unchanged.) This means if the binary in /usr/local/foo/bin/foo
and it wishes to find libfoo.so,
one of the places that the runtime linker
(ld-linux.so) will look when it
tries to load libraries is /usr/local/foo/bin/../lib,
which equates to /usr/local/foo/lib. Presto,
it finds libfoo.so and everyone
is happy, and nobody had to set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH or modify /etc/ld.so.conf.
This means you can, if you want, distributed software that all goes into a directory, and that the directory can be put into any location you wish without any configuration changes needed to run it.
As a matter of fact, even if your goal isn't to distributed a package with all its dependencies bundled in, it still should be the default to use $ORIGIN. If you are building binaries to distribute and your install process require the user to use ldconfig or modify LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you should consider the build broken.
I've,
Built corporate infrastructure with Java for about ten years now. I've coded probably a million lines of Java in that time frame.
Except because of the most minor of Java changes on Sun's part I've never had to re-write anything.
My Java programs from ten years ago still run just fine.
Sun has many times declared many classes and methods as being obsolete, but they have never turned anything I use off so that I could no longer use it.
So go ahead, complain all you want, but there are people like me out there that are moving forward a lot faster because they use Java, and there are a lot of people moving slower because they cannot get past ideology.
It's fine by me, my children will eat well because of your ineptitude.
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
OO.o 2.0 is already working on free JVMs. FC4 is shipping this, along with Eclipse, Tomcat, and a ton of other stuff. We've got jonas running as well, just not quite ready to ship.