.deb package for Ubuntu: correct Java dependency

I'm currently in the progress of creating a .deb package of our Java-based application, especially for Ubuntu users. Our application runs with the JRE 1.6 and 1.7 from OpenJDK (openjdk-6-jre-headless and openjdk-7-jre-headless), but the use of JRE 1.7 is preferred. Because of that, I'm using

Recommends: openjdk-7-jre-headless

but I'm unsure whether this is the correct dependency. When installing our bundle and neither openjdk-6-jre-headless nor openjdk-7-jre-headless is installed, it should install openjdk-7-jre-headless.


You should depend upon java-runtime-headless (>= 1.6) (which is filled by openjdk-7-jre-headless, and allows any 1.6 or newer JRE that the user has installed to work).

This allows for much more flexibility. For example, I run oracle-java8-jdk on my system; this provides default-jre-headless 1.8 (as well as java7-runtime-headless, java6-runtime-headless, and java5-runtime-headless), but any dependencies upon openjdk would most likely result in me not installing your program because I have no desire to install an older JRE.