I’ve updated my package of the Amazon EC2 API Tools for Debian [1]. Now it uses the Sun JDK. Kaffe doesn’t work due to not supporting annotations, I haven’t filed a bug because Kaffe is known to be incomplete.

OpenJDK doesn’t work – apparently because it doesn’t include trusted root certificates (see Debian bug #501643) [2].

GCJ doesn’t work, not sure why so I filed Debian bug #501743 [3].

I don’t think that Java is an ideal language choice for utility programs. It seems that Perl might be a better option as it’s supported everywhere and has always been free (the Sun JVM has only just started to become free). The lack of freeness of Java results in a lower quality, and in this case several hours of my time wasted.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/ec2/
• [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501643
• [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=501743

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