Comment 12 for bug 59987

Hey,

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Matthias Klose wrote:
> Ben Maurer schrieb:
>> Many users need to use java5 because it is used by other people they
>> work with. Expecting them to figure out how to make it the default JRE
>> by editing lots of text files is not reasonable.
>>
>> Maybe the easiest way to do this would be to have a way to (easily)
>> *uninstall* gcj. That would allow us to still have sun java lower on
>> each of the priority lists.
>
> you can try this yourself. it may be possible. going this way means that
> free software runs using non-free software, or all software needing
> java needs to be moved to multiverse, which is not going to happen.

There are many people who want/need to run the official Java packages and
are willing to sacrifice a bit of Free as in Freedom to do so.

>> Whatever the solution, I think it should be possible to have the sun JRE
>> as one's default Java environment by only installing a set of packages
>
> and you want the same for each other java runtime. that's not going to
> work. further, we don't support sun-java5 in main, so the best solution
> is to prefer the supported option.

What about a solution such as this:

Every package that installes a JRE has a package called default-java-X for
example, default-java-gcj, default-java-sun. The packages conflict with
each other, so only one can be installed.

Wouldn't this solution allow people to *easily* switch the default JRE?

-b