Re: testing before a release

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 10:28:25PM -0500, Brian Jones wrote:
> I'd like to ask that those of you interested in using and building
> Classpath give the current CVS version a try and report back on any
> problems that are encountered with building the software.  Please take
> a new look at the HACKING file to verify you have the necessary
> prereqs for building from CVS.
I seem to need to upgrade my build environment. I have:
Autoconf version 2.13
automake (GNU automake) 1.4-p4
ltmain.sh (GNU libtool) 1.3.5 (1.385.2.206 2000/05/27 11:12:27)
Whit which I can run aclocal; autoheader; automake; autoconf but
actually running ./configure --enable-jni gives:
  ./ltconfig: ./ltconfig: No such file or directory
  configure: error: libtool configure failed

Running configure without options seems to run fine.
And my jikes (Version 1.14-0.4 for Debian - 13 May 2001) seems to compile
everything just fine. Running configure --with-gcj also works using gcj
version 3.0.2 (Debian).

I will update my build environment and report any progress on --enable-jni.

> I tried to test some things using ORP but have run into a snag, is
> there another VM capable of using Classpath and it's native libraries
> close to directly out of CVS?
I am afraid no VM uses Classpath out of the box at the moment :(
This does mean that we have no direct way of testing the release at the
moment. But I think we should have a new tarbal up anyway to show people
we are making real progress (and we are!).

One thing about releasing. Although I really want to have new releases more
often we really should make sure that we solve the AWT thing. Being a GNU
project we cannot ignore a request from RMS to change the copyright notice.
Nobody likes this but we need to solve this one way or the other before we
release a new version.

I think this means one of two things. Either we wait till Per Bothner
reports on the progress he has made for the gcc/libgcj project. Hopefully
they come to some sort of agreement that can also be used for the Classpath
project (having both Classpath AWT and libgcj AWT under the same license
would be a big win). Or we make sure that all primary authors of our AWT
implementation don't mind the license change to GPL and we change the
copyright notice for all java.awt.* packages. If the primary authors
(Aaron Renn, Brian Jones and Paul Fisher) mail me this is OK then I will
change the copyright notice as soon as possible.

Just thought of a third option. We could just remove all java.awt.* and
gnu.java.awt.* classes (and any packages that depend on them) from the
release.

Cheers,

Mark
-- 
Stuff to read:
    <http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html>
  What's Wrong with Copy Protection, by John Gilmore