Re: After installing Java, what should I set JAVA_HOME to?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Zachary Kanfer <address@hidden> writes:

> I want Guix to be widely adopted, because I think it's a really cool piece
> of software that deserves more support. To that end, I want to write about
> how high switching costs "use Guix for everything" has, and how much I
> think Guix adoption will be harmed by this advice.

Java is a bit of a special case for Guix.  We build *everything* from
source and that’s something the Java world seems to have agreed not to
do.  This means that there aren’t many Java packages in Guix at this
point and getting Java stuff to work is messy.

Right now I would not use Guix to develop Java things (I’m saying this
as the person who packaged the OpenJDK and various Java libraries for
Guix).  It takes a lot of effort to bootstrap Maven from source and I
don’t know of any other distribution that has even attempted to do
this.  (Maven relies on Maven and usually comes with a bootstrapped
binary to facilitate building Maven.)

That said, I had no problems *using* the Java toolchain for compiling
Java code or for running pre-compiled code from third-party jars.

-- 
Ricardo

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