Indeed I do not see how we could provide support that oracle does not. We should be realistic.
for older systems, you are by your own. Is like that, yes.
We cannot maintain all VM for all possible configurations. Nobody can do that, not even canonical, less us. Ubuntu 8.04 is just too old.
Even JVM is not supported on Ubuntu 8.04: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/config-417990.html (latest is 10.04... which we support, or intent to at least) Also... we are not oracle, we have more limited resources.
So , is not a workaround. Is the only reasonable solution: every software provider in earth supports a limited amount of system configurations, usually from some years ago, we provide at least the sources, instructions and support in the form of help/answering questions.
This is not the only instance of the problem. If I'm not much mistaken, same problem has been recently reported for Debian 7 (Laszlo Zsolt KIss, 08/08/13 10:43). As Andres pointed out (08/08/13 14:40), it's libc is 17 months old. The proposed "solution" was the same - recompile on target system.
in that moment answer was: compile it yourself until we provide a working version (which we now provide). Ubuntu 8 is another problem :( but do not get me wrong... is not that I do not would want to help... is just that I need to be realistic about what I can and what I don't :(
To make me clear, I have no problem if you say "Sorry, we don't support anything older than 12 months. Or 3 years. Or ...". I just don't think that asking people to recompile whenever there is glibc dependency problem is "real solution".
I'm very sorry for starting this pointless discussion.
we can offer support (but should be pretty straight forward, specially in linux systems).
I disagree with the solution proposed in (2), the cost of maintaining such approach would be exponential.
No, not really. There aren't many of those (at least, weren't in my case) and I found out that sometimes I could do better (faster) job :-)
you are invited to provide your working version, it would be cool for everybody :)
Unfortunately, I've done it for a different VM :-)
Best, Jan