Hello, Le Dimanche 3 Octobre 2004 22:03, Omry Yadan a écrit : > This is all very confusing to new users. > Having to create a package is kind of awkward, since I just want to > install someone else's packages. > is it not possible to bundle sun's Java as a basic package (in contrib, > for example), and allow users to choose which java they want to install > the free kafee, or the not so free j2sdk?
It's clearly, AFAIK, not possible to bundle Sun JDK in Debian for licencing issues. Sun doesn't allow redistribution/modification of its proprietary JDK or JRE. But I question myself : how can Mandrake bundle Sun JDK on their Powerpacks CD (not available freely via FTP, sold on CD/DVD) ? Did they have a special licencing policy with Sun ? I think this thread maybe discussed before on debian-legal... > as a java developer, I find it quite sad that its so hard to install > java applications through get-apt, the reason is, as far as I can tell > (and I am a newbie with Debian), is that sun's java is not bundled as a > deb, so its impossible to put anything that relies on it in. > of course, there are other java implementations, which are free, but the > truth is, that in my almost five years of programming java > professionaly, I have never heared of them As a developper, you should really have a look at gcj, for example : native compilation of java is really cool and help Java portability ! It's really powerful with SWT or SwingWT [1]... It's really funny to hear Sun saying « Java is portable » : they bring us x86/linux x86/win32 x86/sparc and amd64/linux... BSD ? m68k ? ppc ? > - and surely not tested > anything I wrote on them, so - to say the least, I am not keen to run my > programs on them yet, I have enough problems with the migration to > debian now, and would not like bring some more on myself. > I know the process of creating the package with java-package, or similar > tools may not be hard, but its much more than new users want to do, and > it pretty much a thorn in apt-get pretty butt, at least for me. Cheers, Damien [1] http://swingwt.sf.net -- Damien Raude-Morvan - DrazziB GPG : 0x337C7EBB WWW : www.drazzib.com ICQ : 68119943 TEL : (+33) 06 08 80 36 98
