Please test and stabilize virtual/jdk-1.8.0 & virtual/jre-1.8.0. Oracle JDK/JRE 1.8 has already gone stable. This is necessary to go along with that. Users will complain about Oracle being forced on them. There is no IcedTea/OpenJDK 1.8 as of this time. It will likely be several months before such will be available. Which will be about a year after 1.8 was released. Users need to deal with this lack of choice as it is the state of things in the Java 1.8 world right now. There are also OTHER providers for this virtual that need to be packaged and available such as IBM JDK, per bug 513678. So there will actually be 2 providers for this package, both available today right now, while IcedTea/OpenJDK 1.8 is NOT. You can package OpenJDK 1.8 without IcedTea, but that has never been done. It simply does not make sense to hold all of Java 1.8, and/or to not stabilize what is available right now, for what will be available someday in the future. This is causing a larger issue for Java programmers and/or those who run Java in business, not for consumer/personal preference. IMHO its a mistake to cater to consumer/personal preference over business. Those who need Java have been making blog posts such as http://bengreen.eu/fancyhtml/quickreference/gentoojavaproblems.html http://anydoby.com/jblog/en/linux/2121 If you look at the dates, its not recent and the first one was soon after 1.8 was released by Oracle. Really need to get Gentoo back to having the latest and greatest. Rather than holding off things for close to 1 year for FOSS alternatives. Thus with justification, please stabilize 1.8 virtuals. Thank you!
Only for the sake of knowing a bit more... is there any place where we could see a roadmap or similar for the next icedtea-8? :) Thanks for the info
Unfortunately wltjr and I are in slight disagreement over this. Since this was posted, gnu_andrew has put forward a pre-release ebuild for icedtea-3 (he wants to use the upstream versioning scheme going forward) in java-overlay. I haven't tried it yet but this is where he is currently focusing his efforts so I am cautiously optimistic that we'll have something usable by July, which is when Oracle will stop providing Java 7 updates. Also note that icedtea will continue to see updates for 7 and even 6 for some time though we still intend do away with 6 in Gentoo sooner than that.
I don't think Gentoo should not have a stable 1.8 jdk simply because there is not a from source version that can be built. Despite openjdk and Oracle JDK using the same codebase. Gentoo won't have a stable 1.8 jdk for over a year after Java 1.8 has been released. Who knows what all issues users might run into with using 1.8, that is unknown as Gentoo is being held back for superficial reasons. Even worse there is still no stable 1.7 openjdk/icedtea. Since openjdk 1.8/icedtea-3 isn't even out now, it will be some time before that can be stable. But since 1.7 openjdk/icedtea is not stable and its been available for some time. Its likely some time before openjdk 1.8/icedtea-3 is stable. Java developers tend to care about the latest version of Java, as most developers for given languages. Only users who gripe about not wanting oracle, really the inconvenience of downloading oracle jdk from their website after accepting license. Care about a from source Java. These very same users are NOT participating at all in helping to get either 1.7 openjdk/icedtea stable or anything. IMHO catering to the completely wrong crowd. Thus not getting much help with Java stuff because Java devs can't do much on Gentoo. Cater to developers or users, but Gentoo historically is a developer distro, not user. Catering to developers benefits users much more than catering to users who do not contribute or help develop. Coming from someone who codes in Java mostly for a living. Which I believe very few who do such are using Gentoo. Much less Gentoo being used for production Java stuff.
I'm just a random user, but I agree with William L. Thomson Jr. Some of the java applications we use explicitly state, that they were only tested on official Oracle Java Platform. And while looking at wiki/oracle, it seems like Java 7 u80 released 04/2015 is the last in this series: https://java.com/en/download/faq/java_7.xml https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history#Java_7_updates "Java SE 7 Update 80 2015-04-14 Last public release of Java 7. Same release date with Update 79 as a corresponding Patch Set Update (PSU) for Java SE 7" "After April 2015, Oracle will no longer post updates of Java SE 7 to its public download sites." So now the gentoo users are (by default) stuck with and unmaintaned version of java. Don't get me wrong, I would also prefer an open-source version but if the open-source version is falling behind and blocking productivity/usability/security I don't think it's reasonable to force it.
(In reply to Tomas Mozes from comment #4) > So now the gentoo users are (by default) stuck with and unmaintaned version > of java. Don't get me wrong, I would also prefer an open-source version but > if the open-source version is falling behind and blocking > productivity/usability/security I don't think it's reasonable to force it. You are not in any way stuck. All icedtea is doing is blocking stabilisation of the virtual. oracle-jdk-bin is already stable for 1.8 and has been for a little while so there is nothing to stop you from using it, even as your system VM. If it's in your world file then it should even do the upgrade automatically. The only downside is that you have to keep 1.7 installed. Although 7 was EOL'd in April, I was under the impression that security updates would continue until July. I may have been wrong about that but unless some big security issue breaks out, we may as well give icedtea till the end of month now. We pissed off a lot of users when we marked the 1.7 virtual stable before we marked icedtea-7 stable. We then pissed even more users off when we unmasked the 1.8 virtual for the same reason. If we stabilise the 1.8 virtual now, we'll end up pissing off the first bunch yet again. No, these aren't serious Java users but they make up the vast majority so that's who I'm catering for. Serious Java users, who you can probably count on the fingers of one hand, know how to work around this if they haven't done so already. As I mentioned above, there's practically nothing stopping them anyway.
Gentoo is here for flexibility, you can have your java 7 or java 8 today, no dispute about that. However let's face the facts: - java 7 has been around since 2011 and we have stabilized it like 2 months ago - java 8 has been around for more than a year and since 10/2014 has been the default on java.com It really seems the mainstream is moving to java 8 and it's been a year now - it's not something new. So we know it's mainstream, we have an implementation that is being used in mainstream, why holding back the stabilization? If you have an application that is unable to work with it, ok mark the ebuild compabilible with java 7. If you don't like oracle, mask oracle. I don't say to only stick with oracle - if openjdk is available, make it default (like recently hapenned with MariaDB vs MySQL). However I understand your point James and respect it.
Haven't jdk's been backwards compatible since 1.5 (or earlier)? Why not have oracle jdk 8 satisfy virtual/jdk:1.7 as well as virtual/jdk:1.8 (or have a keyworded virtual/jdk-1.7.0-foo that allows java 8 to satisfy 1.7 if there's some concern about something having a hard dep on a native 1.7 jvm)? Likewise for virtual/jre.
(In reply to BobbyK from comment #7) > Haven't jdk's been backwards compatible since 1.5 (or earlier)? Why not > have oracle jdk 8 satisfy virtual/jdk:1.7 as well as virtual/jdk:1.8 (or > have a keyworded virtual/jdk-1.7.0-foo that allows java 8 to satisfy 1.7 if > there's some concern about something having a hard dep on a native 1.7 jvm)? > Likewise for virtual/jre. Very few ebuilds depend on a specific jdk/jre SLOT with most looking something like >=virtual/jdk-1.6. The ones that are tied to a specific SLOT don't build/run with newer JVMs. They are almost entirely backwards-compatible but not 100%. That isn't the issue here anyway. We can mark 1.8 stable while still having 1.7 and even 1.6 though I'm making a fresh push to kill the latter. The real issue is no Java 8 version of icedtea but that's about to change so expect some movement here soon.
*** Bug 567004 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It's done. Rejoice!
