On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 12:19 +0000, Mike C wrote: > Simon Andrews <simon.andrews <at> bbsrc.ac.uk> writes: > > > It's a problem with a change the X libraries in F8. The Sun java hasn't > > caught up yet. Using IcedTea from F8 should have been OK though - are > > you sure the installer is using the system JRE and doesn't include its own? > > > > There is a discussion and a work round for this problem at: > > > > http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=171763 > > This is a problem with a number of commercial packages which include java > within their distribution - and this includes Maple and Matlab. > > I had a note from the Maple people and quoting: > "Actually this bug applies to more then just Fedora 8. Anyone who has a > Linux distribution with an updated X11 library included in it can > encounter this problem. We did a little checking on this bug a while ago > and we're not sure who's responsible for this; either the X11 people are > or the Java people are. They know what causes the bug but they don't > know how to fix it. > > Basically X11 is being very strict with some of the checking they do > before they'll do anything with the display and Java isn't being strict > enough. Sun says it's not their problem and that it's fixed." > > If you are using the sed edit workaround it is important to find all the > files that need changing and not necessarily two files. There are other > workarounds that have been suggested but it seems not all work for all > people. This is starting to get REALLY FRUSTRATING...! The upshot of what I'm reading here is that the "X guys" and the "Java guys" are in what amounts to a pissing contest over how strict someone should be with a thread safe call, and the loser in all of this is: Me?!? Would a responsible person in the Fedora X team please consider that we can't always use Iced Tea because a lot of important, commercial packages that we would _like_ to run on F8 will not since they require that you use their own built-in JREs, and that's not going to change anytime soon. We also won't always be able to patch some other vendor's built-in JRE with the so-called "sed trick". I think the appropriate thing to do is to temporarily roll the X libs in question in F8 back to the F7 versions (or their equivalents) until the X and Java guys work out their own differences. As it currently stands, these apps will not run - so xlib is keeping the overall system stable by one arbitrary standard by making the system useless for a notable set of popular, needed applications. Whether that stability standard is appropriate or not doesn't matter - for all practical purposes, the apps are still broken, and nobody is fixing it. Will the F8 developers responsible for these libs step up to the plate? Cheers, Chris -- ==================================================== In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. --Yogi Berra
