[CentOS] stock openjdk vs. epel

[Mathieu Baudier]

> Still no java browser plugin for Centos?  I've been reading the web
> all night on this, getting angry.  I can't find any explanation about
> why EPEL did have a working browser plugin, but then Centos introduced
> versions of those same packages that had the plugin removed.  Not to
> mention the fact that Centos keeps the older version (b09) of
> java-1.6.0, and yet yum seems to think it is a newer version.

Java support is indeed problematic as I pointed out in a recent thread
on this list (subject "Recent Java OpenJDK RPMs").
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that RHEL supports specific certified
Java apps, but as soon as one wants to do more (e.g. developing Java
apps using recent Eclipse versions, see [1]...), it becomes
problematic.

Regarding your issue, currently my approach is to build the latest
version locally using the IcedTea build harness:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/RhelBuildInstructions

There is still a problem with the Java plugin on x86_64 though (see
[2], not happening on i386) and I build the other plugin using the
following configure command (to be adapted with your number of CPUs):

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0
./configure --with-openjdk --with-parallel-jobs=4 --enable-npplugin
export JAVA_HOME=
make

However see comments #7 and following of [1] for possible problems
with this plugin. It works ok for me for what I need (but very
slowly).

There was not much reaction on [2]. I strongly suspect that this is an
issue with how the x86_64 version of xulrunner is compiled (because of
the -fPIC error message). I haven't digged further yet, since the
other plugin satisfies my need.

/usr/bin/ld:
/usr/lib64/xulrunner-sdk-1.9/sdk/lib/libxpcomglue_s.a(nsThreadUtils.o):
relocation R_X86_64_PC32 against `nsIThreadManager::COMTypeInfo<int>::kIID' can
not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Anyhow, I definitely need a recent OpenJDK RPM to go in production.
That's why I posted the previous thread ("Recent Java OpenJDK RPMs"):
I know that this won't be an easy task to do it myself, so I'm first
trying to identify similar efforts.

I did not know that there had been an EPEL packaged OpenJdk.
Would you be kind enough to point me to the SRPM you found?

I'll keep the list posted on my progress.
Comments and ideas more than welcome!

Cheers,

Mathieu

[1] http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=401
[2] http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=405