OpenJDK, CLasspath - where are things happening?

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen]

Hi

I was very excited by the release of OpenJDK under GPL, and was
expecting the Classpath community to rise to the occasion and basically
select the best tidbits for a common merge.

I have been reluctant to contribute to any Java clone simply because the
JVM's we are using are all Sun based, so it would not be beneficial to
me - that is before now. I would therefore like to know what has
happened. Is Classpath being abandoned as everybody is flocking to the
openjdk forums? Is everybody just talking over IRC? Or something else?

I built the OpenJDK under Linux, just to see it was possible. The first
thing I wondered about was that the Java code was built by Make instead
of Ant, so already there there is a great deal of possible improvements.

Other takes? What is usable from OpenJDK to fill the gaps in Classpath?

[Mark Wielaard]

Post by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
I was very excited by the release of OpenJDK under GPL, and was
expecting the Classpath community to rise to the occasion and basically
select the best tidbits for a common merge.

Which is basically what is happening in the background, see the work by
the JNode team or IKVM, but things take some time. It isn't always
simple mix-and-match. And people have their current projects to take
care of. GNU Classpath is used by so many projects that we do keep
fixing and improving it as is, not everybody has been upgraded to our
latest 0.95 release for example.

Post by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
I have been reluctant to contribute to any Java clone simply because the
JVM's we are using are all Sun based, so it would not be beneficial to
me - that is before now. I would therefore like to know what has
happened. Is Classpath being abandoned as everybody is flocking to the
openjdk forums? Is everybody just talking over IRC? Or something else?

There is some coordination work being done on some of the openjdk lists
and on irc. There are many many openjdk lists, so you have to search a
little to get all the threads. See
http://blogs.sun.com/tmarble/date/20070531
Big picture overviews can generally be found on
http://planet.classpath.org/

Post by Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
I built the OpenJDK under Linux, just to see it was possible. The first
thing I wondered about was that the Java code was built by Make instead
of Ant, so already there there is a great deal of possible improvements.

:) I am not sure inserting ant in the build process will improve things.
But autoconfiscating openjdk would be nice. A bigger problem is that
there all these binary blobs that need to be replaced before it really
is buildable on and as a free software project. But there are some
people working on replacements to get things going.

Cheers,

Mark

[Andrew Haley]

Post by Mark Wielaard
:) I am not sure inserting ant in the build process will improve things.

Me either. I'd like to fix the build dependencies so that make -j
could speed things up on machines with many processors, but switching
to Ant wouldn't help that at all.

Post by Mark Wielaard
But autoconfiscating openjdk would be nice.

That would effectively be a fork, unless we could persuade upstream to
accept autoconf as well. What would the benefits of autoconf be?

Andrew.

[Mark Wielaard]

Post by Andrew Haley

Post by Mark Wielaard
:) I am not sure inserting ant in the build process will improve things.

Me either. I'd like to fix the build dependencies so that make -j
could speed things up on machines with many processors, but switching
to Ant wouldn't help that at all.

Post by Mark Wielaard
But autoconfiscating openjdk would be nice.

That would effectively be a fork, unless we could persuade upstream to
accept autoconf as well. What would the benefits of autoconf be?

It would potentially make it much more portable like we have with for
example gnu classpath & gcj (although I keep seeing complaints on other
lists from people who cannot make things work on things like solaris or
aix - please report those bugs upstream people! - so maybe these days
autoconf isn't as sure proof a way to get things portable as it used to
be, or maybe GNU/Linux really is the only interesting posix-like system
left). But, yeah, it was also a bit of a joke, I regard antifiscation
and autoconfiscation equally likely to happen (although at least the
later seems to be in the works by at least Andrew and Dalibor for the
tools and javac in openjdk).

Cheers,

Mark