Any IcedTea war stories?

Question

Okay, my first serious question. :-D

I'm playing around with OpenJDK (7, not 6), and am about to start trying to build IcedTea on my Ubuntu system. I'm keen to hear from those who have played with IcedTea and have stories (successes, pitfalls, etc.) to tell. All stories welcome, whatever distribution you use.

Chances are, I'll very soon have my own stories to add to the list…. :-)

ETA: I now have FrankenIcedTea v1 working. (It's just IcedTea 7 + NIO2.) Once I have a blog set up, I can blog about the procedures required, for anyone else who's interested in pursuing this. :-)

Answer 1

I've never built it myself but I've used Linux distributions that provided prebuilt packages for it. All seemed to work perfectly, I didn't notice any missing functionality anyway.

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Edit: Oops! I misread the question and didn't notice the '7'. All versions I've used so far have been 6. Apologies.

Answer 2

@pauldoo: Do you know of any Linux distributions that provide OpenJDK 7, as opposed to OpenJDK 6? Looking at this page it seems to me that Fedora 8 has OpenJDK 7 but Fedora 9 has OpenJDK 6. Do you have Fedora 9, and can you confirm whether Fedora 9 supports OpenJDK 7? (If not, that's fine; I suppose I'll download a copy and run it on a virtual machine.)

My question about Fedora 9 is simply to see whether support for OpenJDK 7 is still being maintained. It sounds from the IcedTea page that they're focusing the bulk of their efforts on OpenJDK 6 these days….

Answer 3

Java 7 is still a work in progress, spec wise, so once sun made all the JDK6 code available, fedora switched to that as it is the "current" version for the moment. In older fedoras, only the JDK7 base was available as GPL (but that changed in recent times).

Answer 4

@Michael: That makes sense, and is what I suspected. Hmm, since I'm actually out here to play with the Java 7 "developmental" features, I suppose I have to hew my own path, to some degree. :-) Thanks all the same.

Answer 5

I'm building IcedTea 7 now. I did a successful build using the version fetched from Mercurial, using plain jane OpenJDK.

Now, I've patched up IcedTea to be able to build NIO2 (mostly so I can play with asynchronous I/O in Java; expect more thread from me about this soon!), and once I get this going, I'll be patching in the Da Vinci Machine as well. :-) And after that, maybe Closures too….

Yes, this is turning into FrankenIcedTea, but frankly (pun intended), what fun is open source without patching things here and there? :-P