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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are technical reasons why this isn't being done, but the approach which suggests itself to me is to introduce a dependency from sun-jdk to openjdk, then replace the contents of sun-jdk with symlinks to the corresponding openjdk files wherever possible. Is it feasible to get enough functional this way to make it worthwhile?

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While it would mean an easy transition, I'm not sure this is the best way either. As others have noted, I've seen odd cases of things performing extremely poorly or failing in strange ways under OpenJDK 6.

Remember, if people have Sun's Java installed now, it's because they deliberately opted to install that over OpenJDK - Sun's has always been in the partner repo, which is disabled by default, OpenJDK being the default on Ubuntu. Silently moving people back to OpenJDK would cause all kinds of non-obvious breakage.

> Remember, if people have Sun's Java installed now, it's because they deliberately opted to install that over OpenJDK

Sort of, the number of "setup ubuntu" or "add codecs to ubuntu" tutorials out that that include replacing openJDK with sun's JVM is very large. While technically people that find such tutorials and blindly copy and paste the commands into their terminal have opted to install Sun's JVM it doesn't mean that they know what they did, why they did it or that it was even necessary.

We originally thought about doing that, but we decided not to. It is likely that some users have installed sun-java6 in order to use applications that are incompatible with OpenJDK. If we silently replace sun-java6 with OpenJDK, they may experience unexpected failures or odd behaviour that will be difficult to diagnose.

... and just deleting the version of Java they have installed is somehow more reasonable? Honestly, the fact that this is even being seriously considered by Ubuntu is pretty much a death blow to me ever trusting a package update from the project again... what's next: a security update that uninstalls Apache from my web server, or one that uninstalls Exim from my email server?

So we would be more trustworthy if we left millions of users vulnerable to being silently compromised by malware?

No, Apache and Exim wouldn't get removed, the source is available so a fix can be issued.

Strawman. Every other suggestion on this page is more reasonable than the one Ubuntu is choosing, whether it be replacing the package with one that is 90% functionally equivalent (openjdk) to printing giant warnings during the package upgrade process. The decision made by Ubuntu is so uncaring for its user community that this reads like comedy.

Removing packages seems to be the way Linux distros handle this type of issue

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-0368.html https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-1045.html

I disagree. Many people leave windows in favor of Ubuntu for increased security against virus and malware.

I agree that there could be more transparent feedback to the user who probably will never check to see what's being update and why, but I don't think this reads like comedy at all.

Maybe a balance and not remove it on servers? I have a pretty locked down environment and trust my ability to read advisories and take necessary precautions. It's weird to presume your users can't deal with that.

Actually, I do think the Ubuntu solution is more reasonable. I installed sun-java6 for precisely the use case mdeslaur described, and I'm pretty sure that the errors from a missing JDK will be much more clear and noticeable than the subtler (but still work-killing) ones from OpenJDK.

Can it not be done to require explicit confirmation at upgrade-time, the same way a license agreement would? It needn't be silent.

Upgrades are silent and unattended. Tools build on that, sysadmins rely on that.

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