Just in time for Fedora 8 test 2 IcedTea has landed in Fedora RawHide. The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from the Sun OpenJDK project using Free Software build tools (gcj) and provides replacements for the non-free binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project. Installing this experimental GPL Java platfom is now as easy as yum install java-1.7.0-icedtea. In addition, Sun has promised to provide a Test Compatibility Kit soon so people can see how 'officially Java' this package really is.
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2005-07-13
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maybe this is just me being ignorant of the situation but, didnt sun open source there java run time environment? and if so why not simply include that instead of a hybid merger with classpath? why settle for an imposter when you can have the real thing? (nohting against classpath)
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Because as the news snippet states, there are some portions that are binary only. Sun was only able to open the source for the portions that they had the rights to do so. Some parts (such as Java2D, and font rasterisation) were under 3rd party licenses.
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I'd assume such things could be accomplished using things like Cairo/Freetype to plugin some of the gaps?
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Java2D folks had already integrated Freetype (via
a pluggable interface, so Sun's JRE can continue
using the proprietary T2K rasterizer, and openjdk-based
can plug-in freetype):
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.build.devel/92
The graphics rasterizer will take longer to replace,
unfortunately.
(Cairo is not exactly a drop-in replacement, although
freetype wasn't either) In fact, we're looking at
other rasterizers.
Dmitri
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Iced Tea was created by Red Hat which was developed in Fedora 7 and Fedora 7 packages were available within a few days though other distributions might have packaged it in their development repository earlier. That would be less work than bootstrapping the code.
Since Iced Tea was not available for PPC architecture and Fedora is about to expand it's architecture support in the next release, there were some concerns about how that would pan out and the current decision is to continue using gcj in those architectures.
Perhaps the more important news here is about TCK compatibility.
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It would be nice if there was some sort of roadmap or status reports, so that we could see exactly what is going on with IcedTea and what still needs to be done. I probably just don't know where to look. Right now all I know about it is the one sentence explanation of what it is, but nothing specific.
Hmm, this page seems to say that Fedora 8 will include it as the default java program and that it is superior to the current gcj already.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/IcedTea
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Yes, I saw that but it doesn't seem to do much except tell you how to get the sources and build it. I don't really want to read through the mailing list.
Just noticed the FAQ, it says javascript and snmp are stubbed and not going to be fixed anytime soon, sound was supposed to be done by the end of August, and pretty much everything else is complete? But maybe buggy...
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Here is a guide to get IcedTea up and running on Gentoo.
http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-java/msg_02270.xml