Is there something we can do about Java?

[Austin English]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:
> I've run into a few applications that simply assume Java is installed. They
> die horribly with a "javaw" not found.
>
> My first inclination is to just pop up a message explaining what went wrong
> and how to fix it, with a clickable link to go Sun's Java download page.
>
> This struck me as similar to the Gecko situation.  In principle, we could
> have a wine-java package containing Sun's binaries and then just install
> them automatically when they're on the system, referring the user to the
> website otherwise.
>
> Distributions would then need to make these packages (just like wine-gecko),
> and also get separate permission from Sun.  This strikes me as rather
> feasible - Ubuntu already ships Sun's Java in its parter repository -
> however we'd need to work out how it would work technically here first.
>  Ideally, Sun's installer wouldn't need to be modified.

How is this different from dotnet20/mfc42/etc.?

-- 
-Austin