[tex-live] Tlmgr closing takes fairly long

[Simon May]

Apologies for digging this out again, but I would like to comment on
this in the interest of educating the public. It is certainly not true
that Java (OpenJDK) is not freely redistributable. The OpenJDK is
licensed under the GPL and has been the reference implementation of Java
since version 7 (see [1]). The “Oracle JDK” and OpenJDK are virtually
identical in any recent version. I do not understand what you mean by
“the GNU Java for Linux” and that it “lacks GUI”. I am not aware of any
Java implementations which omit the graphical user interface toolkits
(AWT and Swing) as these are part of the Java standard library.

There are no “standard classes that are not distributed with JRE but JDK
is required”. Java has a standard library, required to be implemented by
all conforming implementations (like the C standard library for the C
language) and which is distributed in what is called the JRE, or Java
Runtime Environment. The JDK (Java Development Kit) is for development,
as the name suggests. Any program relying specifically on the presence
of a JDK is doing something seriously wrong.

Yes, historically, there have been some differences and difficulties
between open Java implementations and the Sun/Oracle proprietary
distribution, but as explained above, with OpenJDK as the reference
implementation, these have been gone for years. Without any detailed
information, I cannot say why the application you dealt with ran on your
Linux machine, but not on another Windows machine. From experience, I
would rather suggest that the issue is that program installation
(especially runtimes like Java, which are used by many independent
applications) under Windows is a complete mess due to the lack of
package management. Often, Windows users have many different versions of
the JRE are installed at the same time, causing all sorts of trouble.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK


Best wishes,
Simon May


On 30.05.2016 23:56, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 
>     I don't know anything about Java, but I've been told that current
>     implementations are quite fast.
> 
> 
> Yes, it is fast but the GNU Java for Linux lacks GUI, Java for other
> platforms is not freely redistributable, users will have to download and
> install it themselves. It need not be trivial. A few month ago I found
> that a Java app working fine on my Linux did not work on a Windows
> computer and the error message was not useful. The reason was that the
> app required standard classes that are not distributed with JRE but JDK
> is required. It can easily be figured out by a Java expert but not by
> normal users, they will just report that it does not work.
> 
> 
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
> 

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