Java Trial Support Coming In Linux Standard Base

LinuxScribe writes "Java isn't in the LSB — yet. It's been a hard target to hit: which version gets standardized? How will test suites work? But the new version of LSB will take the first steps towards Java inclusion in standardized Linux development by introducing trial support for the language."

Comments

Source

[Enderandrew]

The LSB still doesn't make much in the way for accommodations for source-based distros. And while I laud its efforts, the LSB also states that distros should standardize on RPMs where as the one distro taking off like a rocket is DEB based and unlikely to ever move over to RPMs.

Re:Source

[squiggleslash]

I think if it were anything like as unreliable as, say, Fedora was at the time I tried both of them out, Ubuntu would have ended up in the dustbin of "Populist Distros nobody takes seriously." Shuttleworth has some marketing skills, and has done a good job, but Ubuntu needed to be a good distribution for it to be popular. That alone wouldn't have made it popular, but it was a prerequisite for success.

Whether APT/DEB was a key component to its success is anyone's guess. More likely was the fact it was built on Debian, which is how it ended up with APT/DEB in the first place.

I do agree with the GP's point that the LSB looks increasingly ridiculous standardizing on a packaging system that isn't common to most GNU/Linux installations. The LSB will not be relevant unless the standards it promotes are actually adopted. Of course, it'd be nice to see the RPM people work with the DEB people and come up with some interoperability.

Re:Source

[tenco]

It took off like a rocket and then Intel dumped it for an RPM-based distro.

Go figure.

Ubuntu isn't as well suited for mobile devices as fedora is?

It just goes to show that Ubuntu being popular has nothing to do with it's packaging system OR anything to do with it being any good as a distribution. Mark Shuttleworth really knows how to market things..

You think? I use Ubuntu because Debian stable is outdated most of the time. And for me one major reason for Debian is it's package managment system. Just look how many distros are based on Debian vs. how many are based on fedora or openSuSe (distrowatch).

Re:Source

[Jason Earl]

The LSB is a horrible idea, and it needs to die a sudden, instant, and even immediate death.

You see, the original plan for the LSB was that it would be a installable binary platform that you could install on test hardware and actually use. Perens was involved, and so the original plan was to use Debian as the base for this distribution as it gave them an immediate code base to work with that had been ported to a large number of hardware platforms.

Unfortunately, Caldera didn't want an installable binary distribution, as it thought that an actual working distribution would cut into sales of its product. Red Hat agreed with Caldera mostly because the folks at Red Hat knew that if a binary standard wasn't produced then Red Hat would become the de-facto binary standard.

That's why we have the LSB, and that's why the LSB is about 7 orders of magnitude less important than CentOS, Oracle's Red Hat clone, or any number of Red Hat derivatives all of which simply treat Red Hat Linux as a binary standard.

The LSB is clunky to use, impossible to test against, and specifies so little software that it is basically a joke.

Re:Source

[Ed Avis]

The LSB standard format is rpm v3 format, whereas all current distributions use a newer rpm (from one fork or another) and the old v3 archives are supported only as a legacy format for LSB. I think for political reasons they might rename it from 'rpm' to 'LSB package format' and make sure direct support for v3 packages is removed from rpm, then people wouldn't get so worked up about it somehow being unfair to Debian. No recent distribution actually uses LSB format packages natively.

Re:Source

[ld a,b]

Well, yum is an apt clone wrapped around the useless RPM format, so it is only natural that it approaches now many years later its functionality.

However, nobody with a right mind uses apt in Debian or debian derived distros. There is this magnificent front-end -aptitude- that runs circles around everything else. Maybe Synaptic is what is leading you to believe that Ubuntu is as limited as your distro of choice. It is not, it's just that most options are hidden or made difficult to use by bad design.

Really package management in RPM based linuxes leaves me wondering how can it be that nobody from inside has noticed it is broken. I don't know the technical details that make it so, but it is invariably either much slower, unstable, or both.

Once I checked M*** out. A nice system with a great Desktop. I asked why I couldn't browse the package description. A dev told me it was because they had optimized it out. Their benchmarks showed it was a bottleneck. Nice. Updating the sources still took ten times more than in Ubuntu(Which has one of the very best extensive repositories). BTW, downloading a single description on demand still took 10 seconds. FAmazing!

DEBs have never destroyed my system. I wish I could say the same for F***'s RPMs. Its users are just used to it. L*** T*** couldn't manage to install a flash plugin in His distro of choice and nobody in the RPM camp raised an eyebrow. FAmazing!

Some distributions have slowly fixed RPM so that it is beginning to be usable. So what? If they had made DEB the standard, instead of bending to the RedHat lobbying, by now we would have a much better Linux than we do.

Mod -1 as much you like, Truth won't go away.

A pretty good idea

[NaCh0]

I see it from 2 angles:

*) Linux is so easy to develop for because it comes with a C compiler

*) Java is the language all of the schools teach

To keep new programmers interested in linux, java should be a standard (or at least easy) part of linux distros moving forward.

Experienced users can delete it if they don't want the bloat of it.

Next step, take the butt-ugly out of the java gui widgets.

Re:A pretty good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

*) Java is the language all of the schools teach

That is because most of the schools suck, and the coders they put out are idiots.
Any decent CS major should have exposure to C and ASM, in addition to Java.

Don't get me wrong, I love Java & use it a lot, and it is really nice for teaching a lot of concepts. The problem is that if you ONLY learn Java, you program in this idealistic dream world that says you don't have to worry about platform differences or available resources.

When I give interviews for coders, I give them a couple of tests. The Java-only CS grads can deliver when they have a question that says "Write a robust program to do X, which can be updated with Y without changing X, and still allowing the possibility of adding Z in the future".
When I tell them to do it in a situation where they only get 1 meg of ram, and 1kbps of network capacity, they have no clue where to even start... because they were taught that it doesn't matter what the target hardware or OS is, because Java is cross-platform.

As a result, when you tell them "I have X dollars to buy equipment, and Y dollars to pay for the internet connection, and we need to support Z users" they can't even comprehend how to approach the problem. Because they were taught that such constraints don't matter (& in CS theory they don't) but in the real world they matter very much.

Re:A pretty good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't uninstall it. Well, you could, but it would make your life difficult. The point of having it in the LSB is not so much for the end user, but so that other packages can assume it is present. Try installing closed source (binary) packages - that's what the LSB is really meant for. Maybe that's why it is more of a Redhat than a Debian thing.

Not that I'm against including Java in a standard manner...

Re:Will this FINALLY mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

64-bit support is deferred to a future release.
    xxxxx@xxxxx 2005-06-01 21:40:27 GMT
This RFE has fianaly been comitted to the dolphin (JDK 1.7) release.
Posted Date : 2007-01-16 22:20:04.0

We have not only commit this RFE to JRE 7, but also JRE 6 update release.

The date for JRE 6 update release which has this 64bit JRE support will be early 2009.
Posted Date : 2008-04-09 16:57:04.0

Just an update......
The development/testing of the 64-bit plugin is underway and will be added to JDK6, sometime after the 6u11 release. Stay tuned!
Posted Date : 2008-10-10 21:56:24.0

We are targeting to support this feature in JRE 6u12, we will support Java Plugin/Java webstart on AMD64 arch on both Window and Linux platform.

On linux, we will support Java plugin only on Firefox 3 64bit browser, due to 64bit Firefox is not available on Solaris OS yet, we won't support 64bit Java plugin and Java webstart on Solaris platform at this moment.
Posted Date : 2008-10-13 19:31:42.0