Description: Recent talk about java packages, dependencies and environment compatibilities made me once again think about an idea I first tried to describe some time ago on arch-general (as far as I remember). Would it be possible not to have different java environments conflict with each other and instead provide users with a mechanism of switching their preferred environment on the fly? I think it might not be that hard (haven't tried it though) because it might only involve dealing with $PATH and $JAVA_HOME variables.

I know that some other distributions have this possibility, for example Suse: http://en.opensuse.org/Java/setDefaultJava (they seem to solve this somehow via symlinks).

Do the devs have time to check this out and find a way to do this? If openjdk6 from extra and jdk from community could be installed together, it would probably save a lot of trouble for some people. Also there might be someone then to create a package for example for IBM's Java (sometimes it's useful to try things under different JREs and reinstalling them all the time isn't much fun).