RHEL tidbits

[Ian Young]

On 18 Jun 2013, at 14:31, "Cantor, Scott" <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:

> The test will be whether it's ABI compatible. It's supposed to be, but I
> got hints that 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 wasn't, which is why I didn't use common DLL
> names on Windows for those two.

I'd guess that whatever they do, they can't break things that run on 6.4 when people upgrade to 6.5.  So either it's ABI compatible or they have to supply both versions in parallel in the way they sometimes do with libraries at major RHEL versions.  The latter might mean we'd have to think about how to handle it (explicitly move to the new library, or stay on the old one and miss out on the features).

I'll try and pick up a copy of the 6.5 beta when it comes out and look at what they have done.  I haven't seen any dates for that yet, but anything close to the normal cycle would mean it should be in beta within the next month or so.

>> * RH are saying that they have taken over maintenance of OpenJDK 6 from
>> Oracle, presumably so that they can back-port fixes to RHEL 5 and 6
>> indefinitely.
> 
> Hmm, I guess that in theory means we could consider Java 6 "supported" for
> the purposes of the 2.x IdP.

I think that's probably right.  I found this press release from RH:

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/3/red-hat-reinforces-java-commitment

It talks about "effectively extending support" without really defining that.

> At least on Linux.

Right, there's a difference between fixing bugs and building releases.  There's a mail thread here:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2013-March/thread.html#2890

The first message is from Andrew Haley, the RH guy, and I think he's making it clear that actual OpenJDK 6 *releases* need to be made by the appropriate platform communities.  RH will take care of that for Linux, but:

> * What about Windows/Mac/etc builds?
> 
> I really don't know.  If the Windows/Mac/etc community want to get
> involved, then there will be updates for those platforms.  If not,
> there won't be.  It's up to them.

So at least at this stage, I don't see any reason to believe that OpenJDK is any less unsupported than we thought it was, except on Linux and maybe even only on RHEL.

	-- Ian



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