Re: I wish to help

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Mon, 2002-11-04 at 15:20, Andy Walter wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thursday 31 October 2002 22:45, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > > [Rudolph + GNU Classpath]
> >
> > Nice. Do you use any of the non-rudolph java.awt.* packages/classes?
> 
> No. Sorry if I got that wrong. We use Classpath, except from AWT and 
> java.lang, and the modified AWT classes from Rudolph. So far, we avoided 
> package-internal mixtures.

I meant did you try any of the awt sub-packages not found in Rudolph?
e.g. java.awt.color, java.awt.datatransfer, java.awt.dnd, java.awt.font,
java.awt.geom, java.awt.im, java.awt.im.spi, java.awt.image.renderable
or java.awt.print. I don't expect that much to actually work out of the
box but it would still be interesting to see how they work on top of
Rudolph (but see below).

> > We will probably have to merge a lot between the GNU Classpath
> > implementations and the Rudolph implementations anyhow when we decide to
> > import it. So that might be the ideal time to work away the diverged
> > classes.
> 
> Yes.

Since it seems Acunia will not contribute to GNU Classpath at the moment
we have some less merging to do :{ On the bright side. Stephen Crawley
just fixed the threading issues in Kissme with the latest pthread
library and I am now again able to run our TestAWT program out of the
(CVS) box with Kissme. (It crashes whenever you push any of the buttons,
but still...) And I know that Tom Tromey has a secret dance to get the
GTK+ peers working with libgcj.

It might be a few weeks before I have finished a couple of other things,
but hopefully at the end of this year I will have some more time to hack
on AWT.

> > Yes, that would be a great plan. I am glad that Jeffrey stepped in just
> > at this time so that we now have someone with GTK+ experience that help
> > define the correct interface. What do you think about the current
> > java.awt.peer classes that we have. Are they general/flexible enough?
> 
> I am no graphics specialist, so I can't tell. I'll ask our AWT developers 
> about that. However, I would expect that there are changes necessary in all 
> three implementations (Rudolph, Classpath, and our modified Rudolph), so 
> before going into technical details I wanted to know if all those groups are 
> interested in changing their stuff just for merging with the rest.

I have to admit that I am a little less enthusiastic now that I know
that we won't be really merging in the Rudolph code. But it would still
be interesting to get other peer implementations working with the GNU
Classpath AWT code. Note that there is a (very old) implementation of
xlib peers for libgcj http://www.ii.uib.no/~rolfwr/jcnix/.

Cheers,

Mark