FC4 slimfast slimfest

[Phil Muldoon]

> Regardless of your opinions of the merits of the Java language, it's
> just not heavily used by any of the things that desktop users bump into
> every day.  (Except, *possibly*, web page applets, but I gather you're
> talking about a much bigger scope than that.)

One of the products we have in RHEL is Red Hat Developer Suite, which is
based on java. We do active development on this, and we'd like to bring
it to Fedora. There is a huge community of Eclipse users out there.
Also, there is a large sphere of java usage out there. I'm not going to
argue usage metrics, but suffice to say there is enough usage that
warrants interest im(h)o.

> You may argue that it would be more heavily used if it was more widely
> available, but I don't think language advocacy is a good enough reason
> to make people download more stuff that they don't *yet* want or need.

I'm trying to avoid turning this into advocacy or philosophy of
languages. But having a free java solution in hand, that could be put in
Fedora, but we choose not to (and instead invite people to seek non open
java solutions elsewhere) just sends a conflicting message. The open
source java solution needs work. The open source Eclipse IDE needs work.
These are already well established and populated projects. 

Regards

Phil

> 
> -- 
> Jamie Zawinski      jwz at jwz.org                  http://www.jwz.org/
>                     jwz at dnalounge.com      http://www.dnalounge.com/
>                                          http://jwz.livejournal.com/
>