OK, this is going to be my last contribution to this thread since I
think both our positions are pretty clear and aren't likely to intersect
any time soon :)
I suppose there are a couple of things which could usefully come out of
this:
1) Is there an official source of information for people trying to run
out of distribution apps on Fedora? Since work rounds are often
necessary for many of these packages having an organised place to put
this would be good. I don't know if the fedoraproject wiki would be
able/willing to host this sort of information, but that would probably
be the best place.
2) Java support on linux is going to suffer an upheaval in the next few
months as the influence of the open java initiative starts to be felt.
I have a vested interest in this too as I distribute a few big open
source java applications and although they mostly work OK with IcedTea
there are glitches which still occur. Personally I'm quite excited
about java's future on linux and suspect that the use of the language
will become more widespread as people begin to be able to assume the
presence of an installed JRE.
3) There *are* work rounds for people who need to use old JREs on the
latest fedora, but they're not pretty. The sed patch seems to be the
best one to use if you can easily access the JRE you need to modify and
find all of the affected files. I'd be wary of recommending the
downgrade to F7 X libs. This might work now, but by locking yourself
into an old set of X libs you might start to find that their
dependencies will start to prevent the updating of other parts of the
system (X is pretty central to a lot of stuff). Just out of interest,
can you install the F7 X without having to do a -nodeps in rpm, and does
installing the F7 libraries not break the native java in F8?
OK, back to the day job.
TTFN
Simon.
