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The point of "run anywhere" is to not have to search for a special operating system.
by mateuszf 11y ago
The point of "run anywhere" is to not have to search for a special operating system.
- andor 11y agoI wouldn't conflate the "run anywhere" aspect with OS-level package management. How operating systems handle updates is unrelated to Java, and affects other applications on the system as well. Think about other "run anywhere" technology like Flash, PDF (Adobe Reader), Microsoft Office, Browsers -- they also don't have a great security story and need constant updates. Adobe and Sun decided to ship their software with "Update Managers". Everybody loved them (not), but at least they fulfilled their purpose. 10 years later, Google added background updates with binary patching to Chrome on Windows and Mac OS (not needed on Linux). They decided to just install updates without the user's consent, because that will at least keep them safe. Google can get away with it because everybody expects them to know what they're doing. But I certainly don't want downloading code at runtime to become the norm. That's why distributing updates for third-party apps should be an operating system feature, as it is in all popular Linux distributions. Microsoft and Apple, please feel free to copy.
- mateuszf 11y ago> That's why distributing updates for third-party apps should be an operating system feature, as it is in all popular Linux distributions. Microsoft and Apple, please feel free to copy. That's exactly what I meant when I said > Yeah, the missing bit is that this should be done by OS vendors which sadly is not true.