Building the JDK on Debian GNU/Linux

Ivan Tarasov writes "Ever wanted to hack the JDK sources to get rid of some nasty bug which bothered you for so long, but was embarrassed by the complexity of the JDK build process? Now you have a good tutorial on how to do it on Debian GNU/Linux: last night I posted a blog entry on how to build the JDK 6 (sources of which are available at the Peabody site). This entry describes in detail which packages you need installed, how do you tweak the sources to make them buildable and how to proceed with the build. The build process for other Linux distributions must be very similar, so don't turn away if you don't use Debian. There is also a nice blog entry by Cay Horstmann "Honey, I built the JDK! (on Ubuntu)"."

Comments

Honestly?

[zBoD]

> "Ever wanted to hack the JDK sources to get rid of some nasty bug which bothered you for so long, but was embarrassed by the complexity of the JDK build process?"

=> no.

Re:That's all well and good, but ...

[Doctor Memory]

Well, duh. You've got the source, debug it!

Kids these days...

Re:That's all well and good, but ...

[ximenes]

I just hold the hard drive up to my ear to figure out JDK problems.

Re:Not the real problem

[BigFootApe]

Are you thinking that Sun JDK will conflict with, say, SableVM? Milarky! You just use update-alternatives to point javac, java, javaw, etc. at Sun JDK as the primary provider of said facility.

e.g.

update-alternatives --config java
 
There are 4 alternatives which provide `java'.
 
Selection Alternative
  1 /usr/bin/gij-wrapper-4.0
*2 /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun/bin/java
+3 /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
  4 /usr/bin/gij-wrapper-4.1
 
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2
Using `/usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun/bin/java' to provide `java'.

Simple, no?

Sorry, it would look nicer if slashdot accepted preformatted text :(