Re: I wish to help

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 01:23, Brian Jones wrote:
> Mark Wielaard <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Chris Gray said that they wanted to relicense it if needed but I
> > don't know if they are actually going to donate it to the FSF for
> > inclusion in the GNU Classpath project. Note however that Rudolph is
> > not a peer based implementation.
> 
> I'm trying to get something definite from Chris right now.  There has
> been on-going discussion with RMS, FSF legal, and Chris since he made
> that statement.  There is the potential we could end up including the
> relicensed Rudolph as an external library if it would save us a lot of
> work.  There are some logistics involved in getting our fixes or
> changes back to the upstream source, for instance if we made it
> possible to use native peers as an option since we have some of that
> code already.

Thanks for following up on that! It would be very nice to work more
closely with the Wonka people.

> Opinions?

With respect to licensing/copyright it would be best IMHO to get
everything assigned to the FSF as we have done with all other
contributors.

Has someone actually tried Rudolph with GNU Classpath? I have been
playing a little with our current AWT implementation and Kissme but have
not yet come much further then the screenshot posted by John Leuner.
There are some Kissme thread issues at the moment with the latest
pthreads that Stephen Crawley is working on (and if people want I have
some very ugly hacks to make it more or less work atm). But after that
is fixed nothing should stand in the way of hacking it into a more
usable form.

Also take into account that Wonka contains only the java.awt, 
java.awt.event and java.awt.image packages. We have that and
java.awt.color, java.awt.datatransfer, java.awt.dnd, java.awt.dnd.peer,
java.awt.font, java.awt.geom, java.awt.im, java.awt.im.spi,
java.awt.image.renderable, java.awt.peer and java.awt.print. The
important advantage that Rudolph has is of course that the code that
they have actually works! I haven't checked on class level btw.
(More info can be found on http://wonka.acunia.com/javadoc-0.9.3/)

A small thing, but important to me, is the fact that we have much better
documentation (apidoc) then the Wonka implementation. I know that RMS
finds it important to have good documentation for GNU programs so you
might want to bring up this point (certainly because it is a complicated
matter since the documentation is embedded into the source files).

And please make sure that all arrangements between Acunia and the FSF
are made clear and public. The last deal that was done with respect to
the AWT code (with Transvirtual) was never communicated clearly and that
produced some tensions. (I am perfectly happy to let RMS try to get a
deal that is in the best interest of all free software users as long as
it is clear in the end what has been decided.)

Thanks,

Mark