[ILUG] Windows better than Linux for java upgrades?

[Niall O Broin]

On 27 Nov 2004, at 11:40, Conor Wynne wrote:

> Rebooted into linux (mandrake10), do a "urpmi --autoselect"
> Nothing!

Bad Mandrake so.

> So off I go to http://java.sun.com and download the rpm.
> I do the usual rpm -Uvh j*.rpm and it upgrades.
>
> But its still using the old plugin!
> So I am forced to "unlink /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so" &
> then relink it with the patched java runtime.

This I can't understand. If you updated the RPM then whatever 
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so symlinked to will have been 
changed, and so Mozilla should automatically have the correct plugin.

HOWEVER if Mozilla was running while you did all this (and perhaps you 
have quickstart or some such, so it could have been running even if you 
thought it was not) then it may have had a copy of the old plugin 
loaded in memory.

> I have to repeat the procedure on my SUN JDS2 workstation.
> Surely the RPM package should be altered so that it checks for the
> existence of linked plugins during install time, and relinks where
> appropriate.

So you'd want the RPM to do something like this:

for each file in rpm
do
	search every disk I can find for files which symlink to these files
	change something
done

But as I said, this is moot anyway - if FILEA is a symlink to FILEB 
then as soon as FILEB changes so too does FILEA BUT there could be 
caching issues as discussed above.



Niall