JBoss AS EAP 4.2 requires some packages at newer versions than the ones that come in the RHEL5 Base, so these need to be upgraded. It must be thougly tested if the upgrades cause any problems for existing RHEL-5 applications, like Tomcat5 (and indirectly Eclipse) and others. Bugs have been filed for individual component upgrades.
Vinu, Please move to JIRA if necessary.
This is actually an aggregator, or tracking, bug against the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution regarding the Java packages in "base" (see list of dependencies). For RHEL-5 itself it is being tracked in the Bug #250670. The packages in RHEL-5 are compiled with GCJ, however, so we end up using EAP own builds of the packages, even if at the right version, and made file copies (instead of links) of them to avoid false-positives in the signature compatibility tests performed by QE. This situation can be revisited if IcedTea replaces GCJ in a future RHEL-5 update. Nevertheless, the base packages should be updated, as that facilitates people that want to use the RPMs for community version of JBoss (from jpackage.org) on RHEL-5. But that is tracked on the Bug #250670, so I am marking this one, which is for EAP, as DEFERRED. No need to create a JIRA for it.