7 ms·

Ubuntu: Java packages in Partner archive to be removed on 2012-02-16

82 points by philips 15y ago

philips 15y ago
What strategy are people taking on this? Perhaps it is time to revive the java-package debian package: http://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage http://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage http://packages.debian.org/lenny/java-package http://packages.debian.org/lenny/java-package I forked it here and will be looking into it later today: https://github.com/philips/java-package https://github.com/philips/java-package
j_baker 15y ago
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and thank you for your understanding. Urgh... Couldn't they have phrased this any differently? The only thing that's missing is "Please hold. Your call is important to us."
- andos 15y ago
  Differently? How? Honest question: What's wrong with apologizing and expecting the users to understand there's nothing else they can do?
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Provide a link to an alternative directory, or at the very least a script.
    - andos 15y ago
      They provide a link to a Java 6 Transition wiki in the end of the e-mail.
      - tomjen3 15y ago
        How do I add that to apt-get sources?
  - gioele 15y ago
    Trite sentences actually devalue what the speaker is saying. How many times have we heard that sentence and thought that the speaker was not sincere at all? Now, when a somebody uses it, all those insincere utterances will come to your mind with all the accompanying bad feelings. It is good to see people apologising for inconveniences but, please, take fifteen seconds to think of a sentence that does not sound like a canned reply.
wmwong 15y ago
They offer a solution for the transition: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes/Java6Transition https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes/Java6Transiti...
- mey 15y ago
  I've been aware of the removal, but I think this is the first time I've seen the actual reason for this. Thanks for sharing this link.
lnanek 15y ago
I was pretty floored the first time I was diagnosing a server problem and it turned out an Ubuntu update had pulled the Sun Java out from underneath the Tomcat server that was running and replaced it with OpenJDK, which didn't work for the big webapps that were running. That was last year, though - maybe that was it moving to partner and now it is moving again? I wish they would restrict this funny business to distro upgrades, which people expect to break things.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  Do you usually let ubuntu upgrade packages automatically on live systems? I am not a server admin but that seems like a plan for constant random breakage...
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    They usually only provide security upgrades.
    - starwed 15y ago
      I guess this technically was a security update -- that version of Java had known vulnerabilities that they could not distribute fixes for. (Because of Oracle's license changes.)
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    I do, how else can I be safe(ish) from having my server attacked by some random 0day just because I didn't happen to check the advisories for every single daemon I use every week?
    - 0x0 15y ago
      Or you can get "push notifications" of security updates via SMTP, https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-announce https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-an... :)
- 15y ago
SkyMarshal 15y ago
This is for Ubuntu < 11.10. They're already gone in the 11.10 repositories. I just went through the ordeal of manually installing and setting up JDK6 and JDK7 alongside OpenJDK. Here's how, along with some useful update-alternatives scripts: 1. Download from Oracles' site http://www.oracle.com/java http://www.oracle.com/java. extract, and copy the extracted folder to /usr/lib/jvm (where openjdk is installed by default). 2. Change the default-jvm soft link to the new jdk: > cd /usr/lib/jvm > sudo rm default-jvm > sudo ln -s jdk1.6.0_30 default-jvm 3. In .profile or .bash_profile add: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-jvm (no need to add $JAVA_HOME/bin to your PATH, update-alternatives takes care of that by linking it to /usr/bin) 4. Add the new JDK to /etc/alternatives with update-alternatives command. The trick here is to slave all the jdk1.6.0_30/bin supporting programs to jdk1.6.0_30/bin/java, so that changing from one java to another also changes all the supporting programs as well. Without slaving them, you have to call update-alternatives --config on all of them separately, and there are quite a few as can be seen in the scripts below. https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-install-oraclejdk6-server-allslave.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-install-oraclejdk7-server-allslave.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-remove-all.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... That's it. This lets you install JDK6 and JDK7 side-by-side with OpenJDK (which I apt-get installed first, fwiw), and switch between them with a quick update-alternatives --config, and changing of the default-java soft link. Doing it this way lets you install any number of JDK versions or minor versions side-by-side, and easily switch among them, or upgrade from one to another, and switch back if the new version borked whatever you were running on it. Of course, no more automatic security updates, so you have to keep an eye on that and download the new Oracle JDK minor/update versions when they're released, but on the other hand it's much easier to roll back if an update breaks something, since the prior working version is still there and just and update-alternatives away.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjen3 15y ago
helper 15y ago
For the people using OracleJDK, what are the advantages it has over OpenJDK? Are the differences less in JDK7 vs JDK6?
- tomjen3 15y ago
  It actually works :) In theory it shouldn't matter which JVM interprent the code. In practice those that are not OracleJDK crash.
  - gioele 15y ago
    Doesn't this tell a lot about how much (unit) testing is undergoing in Java-land? If a Ruby VM were to change its behaviour so to cause crashes, dozens of project will start to see red in one or two test cases. From that, it is easy to pin down the problem to 10 lines of code and report it upstream. In Java-land (and, sadly, many other lands) applications suddenly crash and nobody knows why.
    - smackfu 15y ago
      Well we're not talking simple methods that are breaking. It's generally UI stuff that is under specified or places where the Oracle JVM uses native code, etc.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      Not all problems in computers are evidence of no unit-testing. In this case it is simply that a bunch of groups (especially gcj but properly also icedtea) published half-completed implementations of a standard and declared it was good enough to use because it didn't come from Sun.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  I'm using OpenJDK for Java 7 right now, but I'm heavily considering moving to the Oracle version. I keep reading that they're the same codebase, but while that may be, they're hardly the same release. OpenJDK uses these IcedTea releases that don't map to Oracle's "u" releases at all. As of now, IcedTea is lagging behind Oracle JDK 7u2 and it's not clear when it'll catch up. 7u2 has some important bug fixes and invokedynamic performance enhancements. So, it seems like the better release to go with.
stewbrew 15y ago
IMHO the headline should be changed to something like "openjdk packages are favoured over sun-java-* packages, which will be removed ...".
- akent 15y ago
  It's nothing to do with favouritism, Ubuntu are not licenced to distribute it any more: As of August 24th 2011, we no longer have permission to redistribute new Java packages as Oracle has retired the "Operating System Distributor License for Java".
th0ma5 15y ago
would be a great opportunity for someone to write a wrapper script that downloads updates, etc... sucks that oracle can't just let distros figure it out for their respective systems... i guess apple takes the tack of being slow on java, so whatever.
siegler 15y ago
http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the#comment-1307811963518 http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_th... Note that the RI has a very specific purpose (eg, to serve as the RI) and is generally not updated except when/if the specification is revised. So OpenJDK may be adequate as a RI, but will be unstable to use in a production environment.
jiggy2011 15y ago
This is very annoying. The process of doing a Linux install / upgrade of Java from the packages provided on the Oracle website is a real pain since they don't have their own apt repo or even provide a .deb. OpenJDK may be a fine replacement for many use cases but it's really not a 100% drop in replacement. Minecraft requires Oracle Java for one , and I'd hate to think what would happen if you were using ubuntu to host anything important that required it. This is the sort of stuff that ruins the ubuntu's UX.
- Confusion 15y ago
  It surprises me Oracle doesn't provide a .deb for their JRE/JDK: they do for Virtualbox (they even have a repo). So why not for the JRE/JDK?
  - rcthompson 15y ago
    VirtualBox provided an apt repo before Oracle (or was it Sun?) bought them. So they already had the infrastructure set up for providing apt packages. No reason to dismantle it after the acquisition. In contrast, I don't think Oracle/Sun have ever provided debs for Java, so doing so now would require an investment of time, effort, and community collaboration to ensure that their debs incorporate themselves correctly into the system (via "update-alternatives" and such things).
- ansible 15y ago
  AFAIK, OpenJDK is not yet supported for Android development. There are at least issues with the compatibility test suite, and perhaps others. We're going to be installing Oracle Java 6 to our development machines, at least for the short term.
keturn 15y ago
Create a local 'apt' repository for Ubuntu Java packages: https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6 https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6 Just tried it earlier today on 11.10. Worked fine.
sciurus 15y ago
This was previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357623 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357623 Note that back in December they were planning to push "empty packages to the archive, so that the Sun JDK will be removed from all users machines when they do a software update". Now they've changed their minds: "In order to prevent unexpected failures, we will not be pushing out empty packages before removing them from the archive."
babarock 15y ago
I'm confused. According to the Wikipedia article on Java, the source code is released under GPL. Isn't this enough for Canonical to host and distribute the binaries?
- thristian 15y ago
  Apparently, there's the open-source, Free Software OpenJDK, which is freely distributable and which Canonical still distributes, but there's also the official Java binaries released by Sun/Oracle which are under a more restrictive licence. The official binaries for Java 6 are close enough to the OpenJDK implementation that most things run, and the official binaries for Java 7 are actually based on OpenJDK 7, but there's still differences. I've heard of Java-based production systems that were broken by a minor point-release of the official Java binaries, so it's not surprising to me that people would be skittish about switching to an entire other implementation.

82 points by philips 15y ago

What strategy are people taking on this? Perhaps it is time to revive the java-package debian package: http://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage http://wiki.debian.org/JavaPackage http://packages.debian.org/lenny/java-package http://packages.debian.org/lenny/java-package I forked it here and will be looking into it later today: https://github.com/philips/java-package https://github.com/philips/java-package

j_baker 15y ago

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and thank you for your understanding. Urgh... Couldn't they have phrased this any differently? The only thing that's missing is "Please hold. Your call is important to us."

andos 15y ago
Differently? How? Honest question: What's wrong with apologizing and expecting the users to understand there's nothing else they can do?
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Provide a link to an alternative directory, or at the very least a script.
  - andos 15y ago
    They provide a link to a Java 6 Transition wiki in the end of the e-mail.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      How do I add that to apt-get sources?
- gioele 15y ago
  Trite sentences actually devalue what the speaker is saying. How many times have we heard that sentence and thought that the speaker was not sincere at all? Now, when a somebody uses it, all those insincere utterances will come to your mind with all the accompanying bad feelings. It is good to see people apologising for inconveniences but, please, take fifteen seconds to think of a sentence that does not sound like a canned reply.

wmwong 15y ago

They offer a solution for the transition: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes/Java6Transition https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes/Java6Transiti...

mey 15y ago
I've been aware of the removal, but I think this is the first time I've seen the actual reason for this. Thanks for sharing this link.

lnanek 15y ago

I was pretty floored the first time I was diagnosing a server problem and it turned out an Ubuntu update had pulled the Sun Java out from underneath the Tomcat server that was running and replaced it with OpenJDK, which didn't work for the big webapps that were running. That was last year, though - maybe that was it moving to partner and now it is moving again? I wish they would restrict this funny business to distro upgrades, which people expect to break things.

gravitronic 15y ago
Do you usually let ubuntu upgrade packages automatically on live systems? I am not a server admin but that seems like a plan for constant random breakage...
- tomjen3 15y ago
  They usually only provide security upgrades.
  - starwed 15y ago
    I guess this technically was a security update -- that version of Java had known vulnerabilities that they could not distribute fixes for. (Because of Oracle's license changes.)
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I do, how else can I be safe(ish) from having my server attacked by some random 0day just because I didn't happen to check the advisories for every single daemon I use every week?
  - 0x0 15y ago
    Or you can get "push notifications" of security updates via SMTP, https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-announce https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-an... :)
15y ago

SkyMarshal 15y ago

This is for Ubuntu < 11.10. They're already gone in the 11.10 repositories. I just went through the ordeal of manually installing and setting up JDK6 and JDK7 alongside OpenJDK. Here's how, along with some useful update-alternatives scripts: 1. Download from Oracles' site http://www.oracle.com/java http://www.oracle.com/java. extract, and copy the extracted folder to /usr/lib/jvm (where openjdk is installed by default). 2. Change the default-jvm soft link to the new jdk: > cd /usr/lib/jvm > sudo rm default-jvm > sudo ln -s jdk1.6.0_30 default-jvm 3. In .profile or .bash_profile add: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-jvm (no need to add $JAVA_HOME/bin to your PATH, update-alternatives takes care of that by linking it to /usr/bin) 4. Add the new JDK to /etc/alternatives with update-alternatives command. The trick here is to slave all the jdk1.6.0_30/bin supporting programs to jdk1.6.0_30/bin/java, so that changing from one java to another also changes all the supporting programs as well. Without slaving them, you have to call update-alternatives --config on all of them separately, and there are quite a few as can be seen in the scripts below. https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-install-oraclejdk6-server-allslave.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-install-oraclejdk7-server-allslave.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/java/java-alt-remove-all.sh https://raw.github.com/byrongibson/scripts/master/install/ja... That's it. This lets you install JDK6 and JDK7 side-by-side with OpenJDK (which I apt-get installed first, fwiw), and switch between them with a quick update-alternatives --config, and changing of the default-java soft link. Doing it this way lets you install any number of JDK versions or minor versions side-by-side, and easily switch among them, or upgrade from one to another, and switch back if the new version borked whatever you were running on it. Of course, no more automatic security updates, so you have to keep an eye on that and download the new Oracle JDK minor/update versions when they're released, but on the other hand it's much easier to roll back if an update breaks something, since the prior working version is still there and just and update-alternatives away.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
tomjen3 15y ago

helper 15y ago

For the people using OracleJDK, what are the advantages it has over OpenJDK? Are the differences less in JDK7 vs JDK6?

tomjen3 15y ago
It actually works :) In theory it shouldn't matter which JVM interprent the code. In practice those that are not OracleJDK crash.
- gioele 15y ago
  Doesn't this tell a lot about how much (unit) testing is undergoing in Java-land? If a Ruby VM were to change its behaviour so to cause crashes, dozens of project will start to see red in one or two test cases. From that, it is easy to pin down the problem to 10 lines of code and report it upstream. In Java-land (and, sadly, many other lands) applications suddenly crash and nobody knows why.
  - smackfu 15y ago
    Well we're not talking simple methods that are breaking. It's generally UI stuff that is under specified or places where the Oracle JVM uses native code, etc.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Not all problems in computers are evidence of no unit-testing. In this case it is simply that a bunch of groups (especially gcj but properly also icedtea) published half-completed implementations of a standard and declared it was good enough to use because it didn't come from Sun.
nirvdrum 15y ago
I'm using OpenJDK for Java 7 right now, but I'm heavily considering moving to the Oracle version. I keep reading that they're the same codebase, but while that may be, they're hardly the same release. OpenJDK uses these IcedTea releases that don't map to Oracle's "u" releases at all. As of now, IcedTea is lagging behind Oracle JDK 7u2 and it's not clear when it'll catch up. 7u2 has some important bug fixes and invokedynamic performance enhancements. So, it seems like the better release to go with.

stewbrew 15y ago

IMHO the headline should be changed to something like "openjdk packages are favoured over sun-java-* packages, which will be removed ...".

akent 15y ago
It's nothing to do with favouritism, Ubuntu are not licenced to distribute it any more: As of August 24th 2011, we no longer have permission to redistribute new Java packages as Oracle has retired the "Operating System Distributor License for Java".

th0ma5 15y ago

would be a great opportunity for someone to write a wrapper script that downloads updates, etc... sucks that oracle can't just let distros figure it out for their respective systems... i guess apple takes the tack of being slow on java, so whatever.

siegler 15y ago

http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the#comment-1307811963518 http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_th... Note that the RI has a very specific purpose (eg, to serve as the RI) and is generally not updated except when/if the specification is revised. So OpenJDK may be adequate as a RI, but will be unstable to use in a production environment.

jiggy2011 15y ago

This is very annoying. The process of doing a Linux install / upgrade of Java from the packages provided on the Oracle website is a real pain since they don't have their own apt repo or even provide a .deb. OpenJDK may be a fine replacement for many use cases but it's really not a 100% drop in replacement. Minecraft requires Oracle Java for one , and I'd hate to think what would happen if you were using ubuntu to host anything important that required it. This is the sort of stuff that ruins the ubuntu's UX.

Confusion 15y ago
It surprises me Oracle doesn't provide a .deb for their JRE/JDK: they do for Virtualbox (they even have a repo). So why not for the JRE/JDK?
- rcthompson 15y ago
  VirtualBox provided an apt repo before Oracle (or was it Sun?) bought them. So they already had the infrastructure set up for providing apt packages. No reason to dismantle it after the acquisition. In contrast, I don't think Oracle/Sun have ever provided debs for Java, so doing so now would require an investment of time, effort, and community collaboration to ensure that their debs incorporate themselves correctly into the system (via "update-alternatives" and such things).
ansible 15y ago
AFAIK, OpenJDK is not yet supported for Android development. There are at least issues with the compatibility test suite, and perhaps others. We're going to be installing Oracle Java 6 to our development machines, at least for the short term.

keturn 15y ago

Create a local 'apt' repository for Ubuntu Java packages: https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6 https://github.com/flexiondotorg/oab-java6 Just tried it earlier today on 11.10. Worked fine.

sciurus 15y ago

This was previously discussed at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357623 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3357623 Note that back in December they were planning to push "empty packages to the archive, so that the Sun JDK will be removed from all users machines when they do a software update". Now they've changed their minds: "In order to prevent unexpected failures, we will not be pushing out empty packages before removing them from the archive."

babarock 15y ago

I'm confused. According to the Wikipedia article on Java, the source code is released under GPL. Isn't this enough for Canonical to host and distribute the binaries?

thristian 15y ago
Apparently, there's the open-source, Free Software OpenJDK, which is freely distributable and which Canonical still distributes, but there's also the official Java binaries released by Sun/Oracle which are under a more restrictive licence. The official binaries for Java 6 are close enough to the OpenJDK implementation that most things run, and the official binaries for Java 7 are actually based on OpenJDK 7, but there's still differences. I've heard of Java-based production systems that were broken by a minor point-release of the official Java binaries, so it's not surprising to me that people would be skittish about switching to an entire other implementation.