Java port maintainers: What should be installed on the buildbot workers?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 25, 2018, at 06:58, Aaron Madlon-Kay wrote:

>> Huh. The system requirements linked from the download page say "Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.7.3 (Lion) or later.”
> 
> Very interesting. I was able to install JDK 8u161 in my OS X 10.7.5 VM. Apparently Oracle has had contradictory advice about this for a long time, and they never cleared it up:
> https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/oracles-java-8-and-mac-os-x-10-7-x/

Because Oracle!


> I stand corrected.
> 
>> The Mac FAQ also says "If installing an older version of Java is absolutely required, you must first uninstall the current version"; from this I assumed that simultaneous installation of multiple versions is not possible.
> 
> That’s probably talking about the JRE at /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin; an older one will never overwrite a newer one already present there. However we are concerned with the JDK, which lives at /Library/JavaVirtualMachines, and it is most definitely possible to have multiple JDKs installed there.

Do you think there is any value to installing Apple Java 6 first, then installing Oracle Java 8, so that both JDKs are there? I'm just thinking of ancient ports that might be hardcoded to look for the old version that used to be bundled with macOS.


>> Apparently Java 9 exists. It is mentioned on oracle.com but not on java.com. I don't know if I should be attempting to install 8 or 9.
> 
> Java 9 is very new, and it has changes that break building for a large number of projects that are not yet specifically targeting it. I would stick with Java 8 for the near future.

Ok.