During the long years of development of OpenJDK 7, the build process was cleaned up and improved significantly. Many changes (such as replacing the binary plugins with open source components) were included in the main OpenJDK source tree after "soaking" in between other experimental changes in IcedTea.

Due to these changes, the IcedTea 7 source tree contains much fewer patches for OpenJDK 7 compared to its predecessor. Similar to IcedTea 6, Autoconf configure step applies patches and prepares the environment, and the make step runs the original OpenJDK 7 makefiles.

Source patches are mostly used for compatibility with platform Linux libraries (zlib, libpng, and so on) instead of ones contained in the source tree. Makefile patches, besides this task, are also used to change the Java launcher—version switch output. Many applications use these outputs to determine the version of JRE they run on. Besides the version number format, one notable change is that in Oracle the Java...