Hi,
A little while back I was talking about writing a program to check a
user's system and from that information decide what JDK version they
should get. I was being stubborn about writing it in C, but I got over
that fairly quickly :) I'm now working on a shell script that looks at
libc versions. I've gotten to the point where I have to start adding some
brains: some actual information about what JDK version is recommended.
There are a few things I need to know:
-The README in the JDK I have on my local system says that if the
person has both libc5 and glibc, they should grab the glibc, but libc5
should work also. Based on my own experience, where I hand-upgraded glibc
and kept libc5 around also, this is true. Any counter-examples?
-Do you suppose I should suggest the JDK that depends on the
highest compatible (g)libc version? This seems reasonable to me, but
there may be reasons to not do so...
-I was planning to find out if the user is running a certain
distribution and version.. So far I have information about a couple of
systems I have contact with. RedHat seems to put a file
"/etc/redhat-version" with text like "RedHat 5.0 (Hurricane)". Debian
seems to have a file "/etc/debian_version" with text like "2.1". (I'm
doing this from memory, so I could be slightly wrong). As far as I can
see, Slackware (at least the versions I run - old) has no particular
identifying marks that are easy to find. If people want to provide me
with additional information about distributions that have particular
identifying marks and available java packages, send me the URL of the
package and how to identify the distribution.
My basic plan is for the final output to be something like this:
You are running an ix86 system with libc5 and glibc2 installed.
Your glibc version is 2.0.7.
You appear to be running Debian 2.1.
Based on this information, I would suggest these JDK 1.1 packages,
in this order:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/blah/jdk-1.1.8-blah-.deb
...
If you're the sort of person who likes to grab source and compile
it yourself, you're out of luck in this case, (Sun SCSL == evil)
but you can grab these tar-gz binaries:
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/..../
...
As for JDK 1.2 (Java 2) packages, here's what you should grab:
ftp://....
And for JDK 1.2 (Java 2) tar-gz binaries:
ftp://...
Have a ducky day!
Should I bother mentioning JDK 1.0 ?
In each major JDK version, I was planning to list both packages, if
available, or tar-gz binaries. I would list the native package format
first, and then any other compatible package formats (eg, for Debian, list
.deb and then .rpm and others that "alien" can read).
I'd also like to make a quick check for possible pitfalls that show up on
the mailing list a lot. For example, check if the person has X installed,
if not, suggest virtual framebuffer if they need to use AWT for
server-side stuff. Also, maybe check XF86Config for problems with
incompatible color depth?
Any other suggestions for pitfalls to check for? Should I be checking
other libraries required by the JDK like libXpm and other X libs?
Thanks for your input!
dstn.
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