Re: I wish to help

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 01:15, Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Mark" == Mark Wielaard <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Mark> Stephen Crawley just fixed the threading issues in Kissme with
> Mark> the latest pthread library and I am now again able to run our
> Mark> TestAWT program out of the (CVS) box with Kissme. (It crashes
> Mark> whenever you push any of the buttons, but still...) And I know
> Mark> that Tom Tromey has a secret dance to get the GTK+ peers working
> Mark> with libgcj.
> 
> It isn't that secret!  I'll send it to anybody who is interested.  I'm
> sure I've posted it in the past.

I know you did. It is here:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2002-09/msg00144.html

But I just tried to get this working again and it isn't that easy if you
don't know what you have to do precisely. I am unsure which classes
should be included in the shared library (including to many gives libgcj
failure: Duplicate class registration: gnu.java.awt.BitMaskExtent type
failures) and it is unclear which GtkToolkit to use (the
gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk one from Classpath or the gnu.awt.gtk one from
libgcj). I still don't have something working which is why I jokingly
called it Tom Tromey's secret dance.

I got it working once, but I can really not remember the steps of the
dance :( And seeing AWT "working" is fun because you can just see the
bugs in e.g. the LayoutManagers. Graphics bugs at least give you
something fun to stare at.

> Maybe it would help if we checked in the peers and build machinery to
> libgcj.  Then people could have a semi-functional AWT.  Do you think
> that would inspire patches from users?

Yes, I think this is a very nice idea. I cannot promise that I will hack
that much on it. But currently whenever I do want to work with AWT I can
get it easily "working" with Kissme (TestAWT just runs out of the box
now) but then always end up fixing some Kissme VM bugs. Which is also a
useful thing to do, so you might get complains from the Kissme hackers
if you include a "working" AWT in libgcj :)

Cheers,

Mark