[CentOS] CentOS 5.4 64-bit: Java web browser plugin for 64-bit FireFox?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Jan 28 19:36:16 UTC 2010


On 1/28/2010 12:58 PM, Robert Heller wrote:
>
>>> http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/PluginsFor64BitFirefox
>>>
>>> [rhetorical] Why does this mailing list insist on reinventing the wheel
>>> rather than perform a simple search of existing documentation first?
>>
>> You sort-of expect end users to do that.  A more relevant question is
>> why is it shipped broken in the first place?  Is it just Red Hat trying
>> to maintain their reputation for making java as hard to use as possible?
>
> Java is an odd case: *Sun* has weird / non-compatible license issues, so
> RH (or CentOS) cannot just re-distribute the Sun JDK and appearently the
> openjdk does not include a web browser plug in (nothing RH or CentOS can
> do about that).

Netscape was once an odd case and RH managed to deal with it in a usable 
way instead of shipping something different and broken with the same 
name.  The jpackage folks had a perfectly usable way to handle the parts 
that weren't redistributable, back when they weren't redistributable but 
instead of staying compatible with their repository, RH copied parts and 
change them in ways that broke the rest. When the license changed on the 
Sun sdk to make it redistributable and debian incorporated it in their 
main repostiory, RH only added it to the subscription update stream and 
CentOS ignored it completely.  None of this makes any sense to me.

> And it appears that Sun decided to change the name and location of the
> 64-bit plugin, which is what threw me, esp. since in the *32-bit* Sun
> JDK (6u18) the *old* plugin library is just where I expected it to be.
> Why did Sun do *that*?  You would have thought that they would have
> included a README there to explain what they did.
>

Sun engineers are from some other planet?  Since they were so 
cooperative in open-sourcing the codebase when someone asked, I wonder 
if anyone from Red Hat ever explained the expected locations for things 
to land and asked them to build a compatible rpm package the users could 
install?  Having an rpm that doesn't drop into the right places on RH 
doesn't make any sense to me either.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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