Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of Benedetto

[Joachim Gabler]

Hi,

Jaime E. Villate wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 09:12:08AM +0100, Joachim Gabler wrote:
>
> > Benedetto makes use of the swing classes - here we might still have 
> > problems with free implementations.
> > As far as I know there is no complete free implementation of the java 
> > class hierarchy.
> > But this is probably only a matter of time .
> >
> > I tried the kaffe vm yesterday, but it always dumped core (on linux, 
> > kernel 2.4.10 and on solaris 2.7).
> > Do you have any experience with swing and free java vm implementations?
> >
> > Benedetto doesn't use any special features like JNI, it just needs a jvm 
> > 1.2 or higher.
> > It is running with the SUN implementations (different 1.2, 1.3 and 
> > 1.3.1) and the IBM JDK (1.3.1), both worked without any problems.
> >
> > I hope this issue will not be an exclusion criteria for this project - 
> > maybe we can define "running with a free Java implementation" as a goal 
> > for the project.
> >     
>
> Sorry, I cannot approve your project as long as it depends on JDK. From what
> you described, it looks like you are not using anything particularly specific
> about JDK and you should be able to remove the dependency on JDK. But I
> can't help you in this matter since I'm very ignorant in Java. I advice you to
> get in touch with the developers of the classpath project (GNU's replacement
> for JDK): http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/classpath or with the maintainer of
> some JVM in Debian.
>     
Benedetto depends on a Java 2 compatible jdk, including swing.
There are a number of open source projects that will provide such a jdk in
the future, but I could not find any one that is already complete enought
to run benedetto or is running stable.
    
There is one vm listed on a gnu.org page (japhar) that supports Java 2 (jdk
1.2), but I could not get it to running stable - I can run a simple hello
world, but not a bigger application.
Anyway, it would probably not help us, as japhar itself depends on a jdk
for its build process.
> I hope you don't get discouraged by Savannah's policy. Some people may think
> it's too drastic to reject projects because they depend on proprietary
> software, but we feel that it has been a very difficult task to finallly have
> a complete, absolutely free, operating system (Debian GNU/Linux) and if we do
> not protect it from proprietary intrusions, we may end up loosing it.
>       
I can understand your standpoint and I highly appreciate your work.
But in the case of Java it will make it impossible for you to host open source
projects that use state of the art gui development, using techniques and
classes of the JDK 1.2 or 1.3 until a compatible really free implementation
is published.
> When you manage to get rid of JDK's dependency, you can resubmit your
> project. It is a hassle having to go through all the steps again and
> re-writing the project description, but if you did not save a copy of it in a
> file, I can send it to you.
>         
I will not be able to get rid of the swing classes - the complete GUI is
built using swing and maybe other features that were not available in JDK's
before version 1.2.
As I do not want to wait until a free JDK 1.2 or higher is available, I'll
have to look for another site to host my project.
        
Thanks a lot for your help and the time you took to check my project and
for our discussion.
        
Best regards,
        
  Joachim
> Best regards,
> Jaime
>
>
>