java alternatives

[Deepak Bhole]

* anonymous <bitskrieg at gmail.com> [2009-04-16 16:36]:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm running Fedora 10 and recently installed the Sun Java JDK 6_13 using the
> alternatives command.
> It works fine, including the plugin, but I really don't get the synchronization
> process as discussed in the manual. If I issue the command 
> $ alternatives --display java
> I see that there is a list of 'slaves' associated with the group 'java' already
> present. These slaves are java commands and manpages.
> I assume that I should also have included these slaves, but didn't.
> So the first question I have is how can you add slaves afterwards?
> I tried a number of ways but wasn't able to unless I removed it and reinstalled
> it.
> Also, even though this worked for slaves that were commands, it didn't work for
> the manpages.
> For example,
> $ alternatives (etc.) --slaves /usr/share/man/man1/java.1.gz java.1.gz /opt/
> java/man/man1/java.1 does not work.
>

You won't be able to add slaves afterwards. They can only be done when
the alternative is installed. As for adding them for the Sun JRE/JDK,
the easiest way is to see what the openjdk rpm does and replace the
paths with where you install the Sun VM. To see what the openjdk rpms
do, you can run 'rpm -q --scripts java-1.6.0-openjdk{,-devel,-plugin}'
 
> I'm not even sure if I understand this correctly, but I can't find any good
> documentation on the alternative system.
> 
> Afterwards there was a message that stated the group was now in manual mode
> instead of automatic.
> Basically my take is that when it's in automatic mode, then if you switch to
> the other version using the command
> $ alternative --config
> All the other slaves will switch associated with the group will switch over as
> well.
> Now that it is in manual mode, do I have to switch each slave myself? How?
> 

No, the Auto/Manual mode only decides which group is chosen. In Auto mode, 
the group with highest priority is always selected. In manual, whatever is 
selected stays that way even if a higher priority group is installed.

PS: Out of curiosity.. why do you need the Sun VM? Is something lacking
in OpenJDK?

Deepak


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