[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #53305] usejava ("awt") may fail on macOS

[Andrew Janke]

Follow-up Comment #11, bug #53305 (project octave):

> How long will it take for u171 to diffuse into user's installations? It was
released in April, but I also suspect they have pushy background update
software that works hard to make you update to the latest JDK. 

That's a really good question. 

I don't recall seeing any nag screens on my Mac machines, many of which were
not updated to u171 until I was working on this issue, so I think there
actually isn't a background updater/notifier for JDK on Mac, even though
that's how Oracle normally operates. I also have a VM that is running just JDK
1.7, and I haven't seen any update nag screens there either.

So I can only guess at how many users are still running older versions of the
JDK, but my guess would be: a lot. Because how would they know they're
supposed to upgrade?

Sebastian and I are working on an "Oracle.app" distribution of Oracle for Mac,
with an accompanying https://octave-app.org/ website. We could put up a page
there for "what to do with Octave if you get an 'Install Java 6' dialog" and I
think it could get decent Googlejuice, but users would have to know what to
search for in the first place, instead of writing it off as an inscrutable app
crash with a weird dialog.

This also depends on whether GNU Octave wants to support Java 1.7 on Mac. The
last (ever) available JDK 1.7 still has the bug. Per Oracle's system
requirements at https://java.com/en/download/help/sysreq.xml, JDK 8 is
supported all the way back to OS X 10.8, which is pretty old in Mac terms, so
I don't think it would be unreasonable to just support Java 1.8+ on Mac.

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