[PLUG-TALK] [PLUG] pdftk gcj dependencies (was: Re: Banning package(es) for good in Debian and Ubuntu)

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 19:43:19 UTC 2008


(Moved to plug-talk, since I'm verging on a rant here ;)

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Rogan Creswick wrote:
>> By Java standards, this is an extremely odd way to structure a project,
>> and it's quite unfortunate that gcj is so tightly coupled with the build
>> process. I would like to use pdftk, but I am not about to put up with gcj
>> for one application.
>
>   I'm sorry it's giving you such a hard time. I've not seen any issues with
> gcj, but I've not explicitly used it for anything.

The biggest problem with gcj is that it masquerades as a drop-in
replacement for the Sun Java tools, but it is *not*.  I frequently run
into situations such as:  I show up to work, run an update on the
(java) project I'm working on, kick off an automated build, and spend
the next 2-3 hours trying to figure out which of the updates broke
everything and caused ClassNotFound exceptions to come streaming in
from everywhere.

Eventually I'll think to check update-alternatives, to find that the
safe-upgrade I ran over night re-instated gcj as the default java
compiler / vm / keystore app / etc.

It's nearly as shocking as waking up to find that your shell was
switched to something that doesn't support pipes, for example.

I don't like it, but java environments are extremely important for my
day-to-day activities.

--Rogan



More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list