Java 1.6 & Mac OS X 64 bits

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Hello,

For your information, we just increased the minimal dependency on Java.
Now, to build / run Scilab, you will need to have a JVM compatible with
version 1.6.

This has many advantages:
* Some high level components for user interface which were not available
with Java 1.5
* Overall performances improvements
* Many bug fixes in the recent releases of the JVM
* A supported JVM (the support of Java 1.5 has been stopped by
Oracle/Sun in last october)
* The 1.5 Sun family has not free implementation.


The main drawback is for user Mac OS X users. Apple is managing itself
the integration of the JVM/JDK into Mac OS X. 
For version 1.6, they dropped the support of 32 bits of Java and the
free implementation (OpenJDK) needs a X server to run (at least, AFAIK).

Therefor, Scilab will only be available as 64 bits distributions. This
should have a null (or tiny impact) since almost all 10.5 versions are
64 bit ready (and all 10.6).
However, if you are building Scilab yourself under Mac OS X, please note
that you will need all native dependencies to be compile 64 bit.

I updated the dedicated page in the Wiki:
http://wiki.scilab.org/Compiling_Scilab_5.x_under_MacOSX

Don't hesitate if you have any question,
Sylvestre

[1] http://java.sun.com/products/archive/eol.policy.html