Java Development Updates for openSUSE

Michal Vyskocil has requested a new mailing list around Java topics. You can subscribe to it or browse the newly created archive. This nicely fits our other Java changes, which can be discussed on the mailing list:

• Debian and Ubuntu based Java buildings: It was not possible so far to build Java based packages for Debian or Ubuntu, because Java lives there in non-free or Multiverse repositories. We have imported these as Debian:Etch:NonFree or Ubuntu:*:Multiverse projects to offer java builds in future. We would like to thank Carsten Höger from Open-Xchange for his help and the needed java preinit package. A nice example for using Java on deb based distributions is the server:OX:snapshot project.

• openSUSE:Factory is using open source Java from openJDK6 now. We switched to openJDK6 as default Java to be able to deliver a complete open source Factory distribution including Java. This is currently not a final decision, just a test approach to evaluate the situation. This affects also everybody who builds a Java package for Factory using the generic “BuildRequires: java-devel”, openJDK6 will be used in this case as a Java environment. A drawback is the increased bootstrap time for Java in Factory atm, increasing the time for a complete Factory rebuild to several days. We are working hard to avoid this again in future.