Do you really need proper Java from Sun/IBM? If not, then you can use one of the OpenSource offerings already in testing/sarge (including sablevm, kaffe, GNU classpath, jikes, among others).
You can have a reasonably good development system if you install the package free-java-sdk. It *won't* be as one of the private, non-free implementations, but they are available for many platforms and it consists only of Free Software. In fact, the maintainers of the packages are quite responsive, since they want to get more and more Java packages in main (instead of having them only in contrib, which is not part of the distribution). And not only are the maintainers responsive, but also the upstream developers working quite fast on improving their systems (especially, classpath, which is shared in one way or another among the free virtual machines). I would say that the Java team in Debian is one of the most responsive, together with the teTeX maintainers and the core Gnome team (I'm excluding here infra-structure teams like debian-installer -- these guys are heroes). Hope this helps, Rogério. P.S.: Unfortunately, I feel that I can't say the same about some other developers in Debian, that should be "pinged" to see if they are still interested in the project. In my very humble and uninformed opinion, some maintainers should really give up maintaining their packages or should try to get other people as co-maintainers, if they lack the time to fix their packages. :-( If they applied to the project, then, they committed themselves to some responsibilities and even though the project is mostly driven by volunteers, if they can't keep up with their committments, then they should politely be asked to give space to other people. And I can tell you that there are other people interested in *working* for the project. -- Rogério Brito : [EMAIL PROTECTED] : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
