IcedTea 1.6 is now available

[Darren Albers]

Distro Version: Hardy Alpha 5
Package Version: 7~b24-1.5+20080118-1

IcedTea version 1.6 is now available and includes Java WebStart which is a big requirement for a lot of people.

It looks like the webstart stuff went in around early Feb so the snapshot Ubuntu has doesn't include this work.

Any chance we can get an exception to the freeze to get this in?

As a side benefit it would also likely resolve the Non-working WebStart icon in the menu bug as well ;-)

[Murat Gunes (mgunes)]

Thanks for your report. Please provide the required information listed in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreezeExceptionProcess.

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

#state the reason why you feel it is necessary

IcedTea 1.6 is the final version of the SVN snapshot Ubuntu is currently running.
Since the last snapshot was made there were a number of significant enhancements made:
  *JNLP support
  * A large number of bugs.

#attach (as files)
    * diffstat (recursively) of the directories resulting from untarring the upstream tarballs
    * diff -ruN <package>-{old-version,new-version}/ | diffstat > diffstat.txt
    * diff of the Upstream ChangeLog (not debian/changelog)
    * diff -u <package>-{old-version,new-version}/ChangeLog > changelog.diff

It looks like most of these are assuming that there is an upstream (ie debian) release and I do not see one at packages.debian.org so I am using the source.

The release announcement is located at:
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2008-February/001172.html

The changelogs are located at:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea/log/bb3929528d3e

I am also attaching the changelog and News from the source tarball

# subscribe (not assign) it to the 'motu-release' team.

Done.

Thanks!

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

News from the source tarball

[StefanPotyra (sistpoty)]

Hi,

Darren, there is no assumption about a debian version there. What's interesting for us is e.g. a rough estimation of how much code was changed between the version currently in hardy and the one you propose as update.

So please attach a diffstat, diff of the upstream changelog (as we'd like to know what *new* features are there w.o. having to look search for new changelog entries by hand first), a build log and an install log.

Thanks,
     Stefan.

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

Thank you Stefan, I will take a look at doing that this weekend. I plan on pulling the changelogs from starting from the date of the GIT snapshot in place now and providing a diff of the existing source versus the existing package.

[Cesare Tirabassi (norsetto)]

Also, I would like if you could expand on:

Netx support added. Still a work-in-progress.

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

Cesare,

Well I am not 100% certain what is missing since I could not find a roadmap but tentatively it looks like most Java Web Start applications work. The code is based on NetX which has a feature comparison here:
http://jnlp.sourceforge.net/netx/compare.html

I have some webstart apps that I use for work and if IcedTea's webstart support was sufficient I would be down to very few applications on my system that were not truly Free. If they don't work then I will just wait until Sun finishes their work on OpenJDK but it would be nice to be Free now rather than later ;-)

Thanks!

[Murat Gunes (mgunes)]

The availability of Web Start (bug #156673) is a significant improvement. Expecting build and install logs to set as Triaged.

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

For an FFe, leave it at New. Motu-release will set it to confirmed when it's
approved.

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

Since this package is in Universe should I be providing packages or should that be left to the MOTU team?

[Scott Kitterman (kitterman)]

Your odds are way better if you an provide packages (attach your diff.gz to
the bug).

[Matti Lindell (mlind)]

I'd be very interested to have this too in Hardy. I suggest to ping doko if he has any extra time to take a look at this as he's basically maintaining the package and has done all the previous uploads.

[Sarah Kowalik (hobbsee-deactivatedaccount)]

In theory, +1, but someone had better provide packages *really* fast - hardy is very close.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

see openjdk-6

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

I have been reviewing the documentation on doing this. I have created a number of packages in the past so I thought this would be easy but the structure looks a lot different for this and it doesn't look as simple as when I rolled packages for more basic apps. I am going to ping Doko to see if he can have a look otherwise I will keep trying to work it out.

Matthias, what you mean about openjdk-6? I know that Sun did a code drop for Openjdk 6 but I was under the impression that it still did not build cleanly. Is that not true?

[Darren Albers (dalbers)]

DOH! Doko is Matthias! So that was a bit embarrassing ;-)

Matthias, does your comment mean that you are working on building OpenJDK-6?

Sorry for the confusion there!