[mkgmap-dev] Sea Polygons and java 1.6

Sat Aug 22 19:21:12 BST 2009

Am 22.08.2009 13:18 Uhr schrieb Dermot McNally:
> 2009/8/22 Steve Ratcliffe <steve at parabola.me.uk>:
>   
>> Agreed, so I am especially looking for Mac users to give advice and/or
>> offer to help.  In particular SoyLatte is often suggested, but this
>> requires that you be a research licensee. The openJDK release from the
>> same source has recently appeared and is GPL of course and so has no
>> such restriction, but it is marked beta and although I would be
>> surprised if there were any problem with a command line app it would be
>> good to have it confirmed.
>>     
>
> I'm a mac user and the Java 1.6 requirement of the splitter caused me
> to look into this a bit. After a lot of messing around, including with
> Soylatte (which worked, BTW), I reached the conclusion that on MacOS
> Leopard at least, 1.6 is already available and many Mac users will
> already have it sitting silently on their machines:
>
> http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/javaformacosx105update1.html
>
> The Java preferences application will allow you to switch which
> version of Java is used by default.
>   

Indeed, Mac OS X 10.5 and later support Java 1.6 on 64-bit hardware 
(though, as you say, it needs to be activated in the Java preference 
app). A few older Macs, before they shipped with 64 bit Intel 
processors, still cannot run it. However, if I recall correctly, there 
were only very few early Apples that were shipped with 32bit only 
processors.

The exact java version on my machine with the official Apple build is:
java version "1.6.0_13"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03-211)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02-83, mixed mode)

Considering that (a) Mac OS 10.6 is due really soon now(TM) and (b) all 
recent (last two years?) Apples have 64bit processors, I think it should 
be no problem to switch to Java 6 on Mac.
It would be really nice if, for some transition period, mkgmap would 
still be able to run in a "limited functionality mode" with a 1.5 
runtime, disabling features that require 1.6. But I'm not a Java 
programmer, so I don't know how hard that would be.

Alexander