Re: Help and input needed

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Mark,

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi all,

> - java-gnome bindings. I have already posted it on this list twice so I
>   won't repeat how important I think it is to have our stuff work nicely
>   with it!

O.K., I've done a little bit on this today, and got in touch with the 
java-gnome devs. I still haven't managed to build java-gnome with kaffe, 
but I'll give it another go on thursday. Otoh, the devs have told me 
that their build now works with kaffe, so there is some progress there ;)

> - freedesktop.org has a Desktop Technology Road Map at
>   http://freedesktop.org/~jg/roadmap.html
>   The current entry for "Java" now says:
>
>         Java is available from Sun for Linux, and there are several
>         static Java compilers (e.g. GCJ, part of the GCC compiler suite
>         and Jikes from IBM), and may be preinstalled. The Blackdown
>         project provides community source distributions of Sun's Java
>         for additional platforms that Sun may not. Java release 1.4.2
>         introduces Swing support based on GTK2 look and feel, which aids
>         in the natural integration of GUI applications built with Java
>         on the open source desktop. As this deploys widely over 2004,
>         Java applications using Sun's VM will share the look and feel of
>         Gnome desktops.
>
>   Since they do have a big entry on 'Microsoft Interoperability' it
>   would be nice if we could give suggestions for 'Java Interoperability
>   and/or Compatibility'. Two very important things to mention would be
>   at least the above mentioned java-gnome bindings and of course our
>   gtk+ peers and the recent 2D work. See the whole document for
>   technologies that are interesting to them and us. I think we have (or
>   should have) hooks for almost anything they thing is important
>   (especially when you add related projects like libxmlj, tritonous,
>   etc.). Comments can be send to
>   <https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list>. But can of
>   course also be discussed on this mailinglist first.

I've been thinking about freedesktop.org today. Initially I thought it 
was another desktop project, so that presenting our positions and goals 
should be left to the people who make AWTs work (Graydon, Sascha, 
Stephane, Thomas, etc.). But in a recent discussion about packaging java 
projects on debian-java mailing list, the idea to combine effort on 
packaging java apps between debian, JPackage and gentoo came up, and Jan 
Schulz proposed to place such work under the umbrella of 
freedesktop.org. I believe that this might be good way to approach 
freedesktop.org: on one hand with an effort to ease the deployment of 
java applications & libraries on the desktop, on the other hand 
elaborating how that could be achieved by using free java runtimes based 
on Classpath.

> - A similar initiative is "UserLinux" which has a white paper at
>   http://userlinux.com/white_paper.html from Bruce Perens.
>   Their knowledge about GNU Classpath and friends is also a bit out of
>   tune with reality. It currently says: "Java-like environment: It
>   sounds as if GCJ/Classpath is in the lead among free Java-like
>   implementations, but is not up to Java 2.0 and even misses the Java
>   1.3 standard. There is an implementation of Swing, and Eclipse can now
>   be built . Some of the service providers will need to provide a
>   Sun-derived JDK as an option." Discussion about a better description
>   for that document for the our different free platforms can be done at:
>   http://lists.userlinux.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>   (Or again first on this mailinglist.) The fact that kaffe can now run
>   JBoss must be mentioned!
>   http://www.kaffe.org/~robilad/jboss-3.2.2-screenshot.png

UserLinux white paper sounds a little polemic ocassionally. Anyway, 
competiton is good for GNU/Linux, so one more distribution targetting 
enterprise users can't harm.

Their idea of Java is not very up to date, though, it seems that whoever 
wrote the white paper comes from a LAMP backgroud, with Python replacing 
Perl for some reason or another. They have one policy that could be seen 
as controversial here: contrary to old Noah, they want only one of each 
kind. One web server. One database. One desktop. And I guess one VM as 
well. As I don't want to incite virtual machine dick size competitions 
on the classpath mailing lists, I want to approach them with a balanced 
e-mail that corrects their mistakes and recommends a GNU classpath based 
VM, offering a general overview (names, links) of Classpath based VMs, 
like my recent post to debian-java, just without the details about the 
VMs. Then I'd follow up with an e-mail on kaffe, and our efforts to run 
enterprise-ish software on it. I'd cross-post to GNU Classpath mailing 
list and invite other VM developers to reply to the mail then as well, 
describing their VMs and why they think it would be a good choice for 
UserLinux. Then whoever is making the decisions about UserLinux can make 
those decisions with a little bit more background than they have now.

> - GNU Classpath 1.0 Roadmap
>   Our current "Roadmap" says:
>
>         GNU Classpath 1.0 will be fully compatible with the 1.1 and
>         largely compliant with the 1.2 API specification and will have a
>         stable API for interacting with virtual machines.
>
>   This is a bit minimal. It should say something about the minimal
>   coverage, the state of the documentation and the testsuite.

0 mauve faiures on at least one official VM release sounds like a good 
goal to me.

> - Savannah GNU Classpath code checking
>   We need to check if someone has tempered with any code when they had
>   access to the CVS server. Doing checks against kaffe and libgcj
>   sources should help with this.
>   See also http://savannah.gnu.org/statement.html

I've never (fortunately) had to do someting like this before, so I'm 
slightly confused about what exactly I am supposed to do. Should I check 
if my diffs match my patches I contributed to GNU Classpath? diff 
everything against kaffe's source tree?

cheers,
dalibor topic