Is there something we can do about Java?

Ben Klein shacklein at gmail.com
Tue Mar 9 15:50:27 CST 2010


On 10 March 2010 06:50, Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 8:42 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.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Scott Ritchie
>>
>>
>
> Like this there are dozens of other apps which make assumptions about
> Visual C++ runtimes, MFC and other libraries. I don't think this
> belongs in Wine but is to be solved by things like winetricks. It
> might make sense to launch wine from a script (this script would be
> packaged with Wine) and which upon failure could use winetricks to
> install the missing dependency.

Detecting apps that fail due to missing javaw command doesn't seem
like an elegant solution to me.

Just wondering, would the OpenJDK JRE be easier to manage in terms of
licenses than Sun's installer? Doesn't Java take a long time to
install?



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