starting off

[Chuck Robey]

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Greg Lewis wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 01:50:16PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> 
> I think Dan answered this, but just to sum up the differences:
> 
> Diablo is a Java compatible release sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.
> It is based off of Sun's partner only sources rather than public sources
> and has passed Sun's compatibility test suite.  The current Diablo release
> is based on Java 6 Update 7.  It is only supported on FreeBSD 6 and 7.  If
> it works on 8-CURRENT then thats great, but if it doesn't then you're
> basically out of luck.
> 
> The jdk16 port is based on Sun's public source releases under the JRL.
> The most recent of these is Java 6 Update 3 unfortunately, so its quite
> a bit behind in that sense.  You must compile it from source.  Once
> its been compiled once you can delete the bootstrapping JDK since it
> can compile any port updates itself.
> 
> Note that many of the same people are involved in both ports, so its
> basically the same set of patches to slightly different versions of
> Sun's source when it boils down to it.
> 
> At this point it doesn't look likely that Sun is going to do any more
> JRL licensed source code releases.  Rather, they are focused on OpenJDK
> from a source release perspective.  There is currently an OpenJDK 7 port
> to FreeBSD, but no OpenJDK 6 port.
> 
> In terms of Eclipse, I'd recommend the eclipse-devel port.  It installs
> Eclipse Ganymede (3.4).  I'd install plugins directly for the most part,
> a lot of the FreeBSD plugin ports are out of date I think and Eclipse has
> good support for installing and managing its own plugins from what I
> can tell.  I think eclipse-devel will become eclipse in the near future,
> its just a matter of someone getting time to do it.
> 

OK.  I need here to say that I'm more than a little bit astonished at how easily
the jdk16 port built.  I haven't even tried to use the port for several years,
and the last times I remember trying it, the port really needed great amounts of
hand-holding to get it to work.  You might need to advertise the fact that it
now just plain builds, perfectly, as if it had no bad history at all.  I've used
it already using complex tools, so I can say that another past trick of
FreeBSD-java, that of tossing cores rather often, seems to have been left behind
also.  I'm impressed.  It's sure going to make my job, re-learning java, a whole
great deal easier.

I wasn't aware of the eclipse-devel port, it's perfect for me, thanks.  The only
stumbling block I found was in trying to find the name of the ant port
(apache-ant didn't seem at all obvious to me).  You folks think that there's
some problem with using ant, or Ant, anything more obvious?
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