On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 15:00 +0000, Simon Andrews wrote: > Christopher A. Williams wrote: > > 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. > > With the best will in the world this isn't going to happen, and > personally I don't think it should. > > Fedora includes IcedTea which is to all intents and purposes the Sun JRE > (v1.7). It's been compiled to work with the X libs on F8 and works just > fine. <snip...> With all due respect, I strongly disagree. This is an idealistic position that doesn't fix the practical problem. Having Iced Tea included doesn't help the problem people are having. Period. Suggesting someone to roll back to F7 also isn't practical. Suggesting (as someone else did) that you use the appropriate set of libs from the F7 distro is a little more realistic, but you didn't go there... Understand that you have taken a position that, because a person has a needed application which, by all rights, _should_ run but doesn't bacause of a disagreement that they have no say in, you're telling them that they should use the previous and, by implication, less featured version of Fedora. Ever walked into a store and, based on your personal appearance, had someone greet you by saying, "let me show you something a little less expensive..."? Your suggestion leaves excactly the same feeling with someone. So much for being inclusive. In today's world, you will always have a mix of free and proprietary software to address complete business needs. Commercial vendors aren't going to react as quickly - for many and various reasons ranging from the practical and economic to those that make no sense to anyone. The X and Java guys don't seem likely to work out their differences anytime soon, and even if they did, the commercial vendors relying on these packages aren't likely to change their ways anytime soon either. I have found that the key to gaining acceptance is making appropriate trade-offs and taking practical, measured, acceptable risks, instead of holding to an impractical standard of idealism. It's possible to do that without compromising on core values. It's mandatory to do that to succeed in business. > PS Hopefully the inclusion of a free JRE in the core distribution will > put an end to the inclusion of a program specific JRE alongside java > programs in linux. That always seemed a really hacky way to make your > programs work. It may be hacky, but it still is reality. Taking this type of position does more to hurt Fedora in terms of acceptance than help. Commercial vendors - as well as a number of OpenSource vendors - will continue to include JREs with their software for the foreseeable future because not every OS includes an open JRE. Some may never for reasons of economics, busines model, and even "software religion". Some like OpenOffice will at least provide a choice. But I wouldn't hold my breath untill a freely distributable JRE with consistent, standardized, and cooperative APIs everyone agrees to comes along. Even then you would need it to be all but guaranteed to be included across all of the most popular Linux distros, Mac OS, and Windows. Without that, commercial and several OpenSource vendors will always include their own JRE with their apps. I'll bet good money that F8 will have long since seen its EOL before that happens... -- ==================================================== In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. --Yogi Berra
