Pierre Labastie wrote:
Hi,
Moving the discussion to the list for those not monitoring BLFS-BOOK mails,
see ticket #5686.
The summary is that Java 7 being not considered secure anymore, and Java 8
being out, we should move to Java 8. Furthermore, while icedtea used to be the
only usable build system for previous versions, this is not true anymore,
since the OpenJDK devs have moved to autotools. Icedtea only brings in a
couple of patches for using system libraries. So, as done by other distros, it
is suggested to change and use the OpenJDK sources.
Now, while the first stable release of Java 8 came out in last April, it is
not considered secure anymore. There are three updates: update 20 came out a
couple of months ago, update 25 seems more recent, and update 40 is scheduled
for next March. I've seen that Debian has update 40 in "unstable" (still at
Java 7 in "testing"), that ArchLinux uses update 25, that Fedora 21 should
ship Java 8 as the default JVM, and that it is update 25, but the packages for
Fedora 22 are already out and they are using update 40. Also Ubuntu 14.10 has
update 40.
So the first question is: which update? My answer here is that since BLFS 7.7
is scheduled for March-April 2015, and update 40 should be out by then, use
update 40. The downside is that there are snapshots ("builds" numbered
"bxx")released every week. Which "build" to choose is not clear to me.
I guess the other solution is update 25, which does not evolve anymore (at b18
for a month or so), and is the current one used for Oracle's proprietary JDK.
I would not recommend using update 20, since nobody seems to be using it...
Another question is whether we should keep the Java 7 page in the book. At
first, I was thinking that it might be good if anybody is using BLFS for Java
development, that both versions be available, in order to make a smooth
transition (normally Java 8 is backward compatible with previous versions, but
not the other way around, so I guess jar's have to be recompiled to run on a
Java 8 VM). OTOH, a lot of Java 7 binaries are available on Anduin, so if
anybody wants to use java 7, they can just download one of them, and set up
their system to use it.
My opinion from your discussion would be to go with update 25 as it
seems to be the most recent stable version. If update 40 goes stable
before the next BLFS release, then we should update to that. Hopefully
the build instructions will remain stable.
The schedule for the next BLFS release is March 1st with a package
freeze mid February, but upstream developments can make that slip as the
late glibc release did in September. It would be good to get experience
with the new version in -dev now.
We really don't want two versions in the book.
I will say that we really don't have much that is based on Java in the
book. AFAICS fop, icedtea-web, icedtea-sound, and freetts are the only
packages that require it. There are about 14 other packages where it is
optional, but I don't ever recall needing Java for those.
Upgrading to Java 8 also raises the question in my mind if we would need
to keep icedtea-web and icedtea-sound in the book.
-- Bruce
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