I'm not saying it isn't a headache. I'm saying its exactly like the situation was back in 2005 that everyone prior to the formation of Ubuntu was dealing with already with Java.
It'll be interesting to see what Debian decides to do with the sun-java6-jre package in nonfree which ironically were derived from Canonical's partner repository packages.
And really you shouldn't be too upset that Oracle isn't building debs. Even for those of us who use rpm based distributions, the rpm packages provided by Oracle (and by Sun back in the day) aren't particularly stellar. There's a reason why the jpackage project exists and encourages people to rebuild rpms using their nosrc approach instead of the Sun/Oracle packages to build well formed rpm packages.
And we've already seen examples of Debian doing this sort of workaround when redistribution of the code is not allowed by the license. I'm pretty sure the standard debian and Ubuntu flash-plugin package has historically had to work around a lack of redistribution rights and pull the flash-plugin payload at package install in what is essentially a fake package wrapper that sets up the dependencies correctly and what not. I'm sure a similar deb packaging technical workaround can be found for the oracle jre6 bin if there is enough desire to do it.
Posted Dec 16, 2011 20:20 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
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With that bit of historic information in hand from Oct, the move by Canonical is even less newsworthy really and should have been expected.
Also worth noting the the deb bugreport discussion stresses migration to openjdk instead of trying to support the download packaging hack used by flash plugin package. Seems all the important considerations are all old news.
-jef
Sun JDK & Android AOSP
Posted Dec 17, 2011 6:25 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
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For Debian stable/oldstable it seems that it will stay around. Although non-free is not supported by the Debian security team, it sounds like they might issue a DSA stating that there are unfixable security issues and strongly encourage switching to OpenJDK.
Sun JDK & Android AOSP
Posted Dec 17, 2011 17:04 UTC (Sat) by jond (subscriber, #37669)
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Prior to the DLJ, there was a "java-package" tool that did exactly what you describe (but imho was much more robust than the flash installer).
Someone may reintroduce it, or support could be grafted into a generic packaging helper tool such as 'game-data-packer' (which could rename and lose the 'game-' prefix).