[CentOS-docs] Suggestion for "how to" section: easy way to install the JDK?

[Ned Slider]

On 09/10/10 08:32, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:

<snip>

>
> At least the jre package (and I am almost sure jdk too) from Sun comes
> with the following structure:
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   16 Apr 10 01:25 default ->  /usr/java/latest
> drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jun 28 23:34 jre1.6.0_20
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   21 Jun 28 23:35 latest ->  /usr/java/jre1.6.0_20
>
> Using /usr/java/latest and / or /usr/java/default in your scripts makes
> them immune to upgrades, as long as you stick with Sun's packages (
> which - sad but true - make the java-openjdk / gcj packages useless and
> offer ( for the moment ) better compatibility with the real world. At
> least from I where I stand.
>

Are these redistributable? I'm sure they are as Red Hat has Sun's Java 
packages on it's
RHEL Supplementary disk for RHEL5 which it (re)distributes to customers.

In which case why doesn't someone just repackage these and stick them in 
CentOS Extras/rpmforge or somewhere and the problem largely goes away. 
Or am I missing something?

If we had decent packages that Just Worked, we wouldn't need convoluted 
documentation on how to install Java.