Java she wanted, Java she got

It is with great pride that I am able to announce the ‘new’ Java system is now stable on all archs where we support Java! That means amd64, ia64, ppc, ppc64, and x86.

In case you’ve been stuck in a cave somewhere, and hadn’t heard anything about the new system, here are some features highlights:

• Changes to user and system VM happens instantly. No more need to run env-update && source /etc/profile!
• One-time changes to the VM by using GENTOO_VM, ie GENTOO_VM=kaffe ant would run ant using kaffe, instead of the user or system VM
• Packages no longer depend on the system VM being set properly. This means that an appropriate VM will be used for building for packages. A package needs 1.5 or later? No sweat! Only builds with 1.4? You got it!
• Now you can use all the Java 1.5 goodness you want with impunity!
• We’ll be able to support Java 1.6 when it comes out in Decemeber in a much more reasonable amount of time.
• Support for configuring your Java browser plugin using eselect.
• Support for configuring your VM using eselect.

While this may seem like a small list, it is a significant improvement over the old way of things. And this list is of user-facing changes… there are also vast improvements which help a lot of the developer side of things (ie making things much more maintainable).

[edit]
On a side note, if you have been using the new system for a while, there are a few things you may want to do:

• Make sure you’re not using the old migration-overlay. This will cause some problems if you try to emerge VMs among other things.
• Remove the package.mask entries if you had used them
• Remove the package.keywords entries if you had used them

In other news… I’ve been always been a bit quiet on the blogging… but, I hope to change that, at least a little bit. I have some ideas for some writeups to show off Gentoo as a Java development platform… so stay tuned 😀