On Mon, 2014-11-10 at 18:17 +0100, 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.
>
> Any comment (even not related to the 2 questions above) welcome.
>
> Regards
> Pierre
Hello Pierre,
As we have stable versions of the book published, it should not make any
difference to updating to java 8 now rather than a number of months down
the track. That way people who do not wish to update to the latest
version still have the instructions available.
We already have it stated for those who bother to read everything that
they should be following the published stable unless they really do need
to go to the development svn version of the books.
The more time we have to test before the next release of the book the
better it will work out. It will be less stressful than for example
waiting till say January to make the update and possibly find that for
what ever reason it does not play nicely with firefox or other
applications that people may install.
Regards,
Christopher.
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