Re: Working On Classpath

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Andrew,

On Sun, 2004-05-23 at 00:03, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>       I would like to help out the GNU Classpath effort with some coding
> work.  I have about 6 years experience of coding in Java, and about half
> that explicitly in C/C++.  As far as I'm aware, I haven't seen any of
> Sun's code for the Java libraries, although I have been forced to work
> with their runtime on a number of occasions (deleting src.zip as part of
> installation), as the Free Java alternatives, such as Classpath, were
> unable to provide a full enough implementation of the libraries.
>
>       I will need to sign my copyright over to the FSF for any work I do on
> Classpath, so I would be gratefully if you could inform me of what
> papers I need to sign and where to send them.

Seems that you are perfect for helping us out.
We are indeed a bit paranoid about making sure that we have a paper
trail about who contributed what and whether we have explicit permission
to distribute it legally.
(See the FAQ and the Hackers guide.
 http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_1
 http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html#SEC2) 
But we are pretty relaxed on who hacks on what.
I'll send you a request form for getting papers to assure that when you
contribute code it is legally yours to contribute and assign to the FSF.

> Looking at the list of
> tasks on your website, the work on javax.imageio seems to best fit the
> kind of work I want to do, but I'd be happy to have a go at most
> challenges.
>
>   Hopefully, Classpath will soon reach a stage where I can
> ditch proprietary Java -- it looks like that's getting pretty close
> now...

That sure is the goal :)

In general the easiest way to get started is to take one of the
development environments based on GNU Classpath (gcj, kaffe, ...) and
take one of the free software projects written in java and see whether
or not they work or not. And then try to figure out which functionality
would be needed to get them working. See also:
http://sources.redhat.com/rhug/
http://www.kaffe.org/compatibility_applications.shtml

Cheers,

Mark

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