[Fink-beginners] To bootstrap on Lion, which JDK (if any)?

[Rodriguez-Mueller, J. <jem...@uc...>]

My question is simple in some ways but may(?) catch a lot of other fink newbies who run into the same confusions.  This email documents the problem I ran into, where I researched to find an answer, and concludes with a request for information.

It is probably relevant that I'm (1) relatively new to Mac, (2) in the first few days of setting up a MacBook Pro with Lion 10.7.2, and (3) am not deeply read into the current state of Java other than knowing it's current corporate patron is Oracle which makes me fear for the "liberality" of its future...

Given that background, I tried installing fink:
> 
> mymachine: fink-0.31.3>  sudo ./bootstrap
> Password: ********
> Please install Java SDK before re-attempting fink bootstrap
> 

So I thought that would be no problem to fix.  Google, download, install, and move on, right?  But the more I looked the more it seemed that there isn't a simple and obviously correct thing to do :-(

When I google "JDK Mac" I get:

Stack overflow complaints that don't have clean answers.

A grossly obsolete FAQ from Apple that doesn't even contain the text "Lion":
http://developer.apple.com/java/faq/

And an ironically amusing forum complaint:
http://www.javaprogrammingforums.com/cafe/6088-i-cant-find-java-jdk-standard-edition-mac-os-x.html

The best I can find that might solve the problem is what seems like a (currently unfinished) attempt to port OpenJDK to Max OSX.  I don't want to install an unfinished programming language to run something as fundamental to my computer's infrastructure as a package manager.  Maybe I should stop being so finicky and just see what happens?  But I'd like to keep the system administration on my laptop clean and tidy, not play around with bleeding edge infrastructure.
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/macosx-port/

I've searched for anyone else having Java problems on the fink mailing lists and found "JDK" mentioned in only two places:

This is a link to a 2006 article on OpenJDK politics
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.foss.nepal/4963

This is a post and then 40 minutes later a re-post documenting a work around for getting a particular version of JBoss to work with a particular JDK version.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.jboss.user/311040
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.jboss.user/311042

…

Once I reached this point in my research I decided that I should probably just summarize the state of my knowledge and ask for wisdom in some place that was google searchable so that other people in the same situation can find this email in the future and then click "next in thread" to find the answer :-)

Does there currently exists a way to use a production ready fink with production ready tools starting from a machine running Lion that came without a JDK?  If my goal is simplicity and stability, should I give up on Java (and hence fink) for now?  Or maybe... is the mac port of OpenJDK more production-ready than its front page looks?

Wisdom (and links to download sites with good instructions) would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jennifer