Not a bash, just the facts

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 24 March 2006 16:56, David Berg wrote:
> What about writing a script (and making it easy to find)  that will
> download the binary, display the agreement, create and install the
> package?  You're not distributing JRE, just providing an
> "automated" way of obtaining it.

That won't work, because of the way Sun's site works. The JRE is not 
on a static link, you have to go through their registration procedure 
and get a dynamic link which changes with every new access. So the 
download can't be automated, it must be done manually.

Of all approaches, the one that works out the easiest in this case is 
Gentoo's package manager. Download the .tgz and copy it 
to /usr/portage/distfiles, run emerge and the .ebuild picks up that 
the files it wants to unpack are present, and it all works. Other 
package managers don't have it quite as easy in this specific case, 
hence the hassle the user has to endure.

The real solution here is to have Sun agree to GPL Java. It's not like 
they will lose anything by doing that. Can you realistically see 
anyone knocking Sun off the top spot re Java?

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five