OpenJDK to replace IcedTea in Fedora 9
by Karsten 'quaid' Wade
Thomas Fitzsimmons updated the Fedora 9 release notes source pages to reflect that Fedora 9 would ship with OpenJDK 6 instead of the IcedTea implementation of OpenJDK 7. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) is due to release in May 2008.
OpenJDK Replaces IcedTea
The OpenJDK 6 packages (java-1.6.0-openjdk*) replace their IcedTea counterparts (java-1.7.0-icedtea*). The Fedora 8 IcedTea package tracks the unstable OpenJDK 7 branch whereas java-1.6.0-openjdk tracks the stable OpenJDK 6 branch. The decision to have OpenJDK 6 replace IcedTea was made for several reasons:
- Sun has replaced most of the encumbrances for which IcedTea was providing replacements.
- OpenJDK contributes ~99% of the code in the java-1.6.0-openjdk package.
- IcedTea’s mandate is to merge as much as possible with OpenJDK, so the differences between IcedTea and OpenJDK should diminish over time.
- OpenJDK 6 is a stable branch, whereas OpenJDK 7 is unstable and not expected to ship a stable release until 2009.
- Sun has licensed the OpenJDK trademark for use in Fedora.
- Shipping both OpenJDK 6 and IcedTea would have been confusing and would have added size to the distribution.
IcedTea continues to provide autotools support, a portable interpreter for ppc and ppc64 support, plugin support, Web Start support and patches to integrate OpenJDK into Fedora. The IcedTea sources are included in the java-1.6.0-openjdk SRPM.
OpenJDK 6 is not Java compatible. Work is underway to certify it as such.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:51 am
I’m glad to see OpenJDK coming along so quickly. I honestly didn’t expect to see it for at least another six months.
March 20th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
So, for someone who believed Fedora was a means to achieve software freedom and would like to keep on using icedtea, what’s the suggestion?
April 18th, 2008 at 11:54 am
[...] From the cool pool of existing presentations, I’ll be cooking up one that focuses on developers — why Fedora is of interest to them as developer/users, and more importantly, why it is of interest as a contributor. You can be sure that OpenJDK 6 in Fedora is going to be a big focus. [...]
April 18th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
java-1.6.0-openjdk is actually icedtea6. There’s no encumbered stuff in those packages. And even pure upstream OpenJDK doesn’t require encumbered stuff to build anymore, all icedtea6 does is add replacements for some missing stuff (plugin, jnlp etc.). So rest assured that there are no non-Free binary blobs in Fedora’s java-1.6.0-openjdk packages.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
[...] OpenJDK: JDK 6 [...]