Hi all,
Requiring that the user runs update-alternatives to run jabref is pretty crude
and is the source of quite a few not-a-bug-reports against jabref.
It possible that this step can be made unnecessary so it would seem sensible
to do so.
It seems wrong that jabref can insist that the system-wide default java is
sun-java.... what happens if there is another package on the system that
requires free-java? The user doesn't want to have to switch back and forth
all the time (and only the sysadmin can switch... what if you have multiple
users on the box wanting the two apps at the same time?).
So there are a few options:
* hard code the paths for the sun jre into /usr/bin/jabref
But that could be fragile as you say. Still, it would be better than the
current situation! Requiring update-alternatives is even more fragile as
evidenced by the number of bug reports that are solved just by running
update-alternatives.
* have /usr/bin/jabref search all versioned paths
To start with you could just use either /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java
or /usr/lib/j2re1.6-sun/bin/java depending on what is installed. If you
wanted to get more fancy, you could iterate over all versioned paths for the
form j2re*-sun. That's also potentially inelegant as it doesn't allow the
user to specify to use java5 or java6 etc. But it would mean that jabref
works out of the box which is a big improvement.
* have an extra entry in /etc/alternatives for sunjava
This would require cooperation from the packager(s) of the sun-java packages
but would probably be the most elegant solution. One would have
/usr/bin/sunjava -> /etc/alternatives/sunjava
-> /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun/bin/java
Thus a script can just use /usr/bin/sunjava and get the system-wide default
sun-java implementation not just the system-wide java. This seems to me to be
the best solution in the long run, but I know little about debian java
packaging!
cheers
Stuart
--
Stuart Prescott www.nanoNANOnano.net
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