[PATCHes] Allow using system's copies of libjpeg, libpng and giflib for splashscreen

[Anthony Petrov]

Hello Diego,

Thanks for the patches. Though, we've got a number of reasons not to 
apply them currently:
1. Not every *NIX desktop has these libraries installed. Throwing them 
out means adding more external dependencies that are not regularly 
required now.
2. Some libraries bundled with the JDK (like the libjpeg) are heavily 
customized by Sun. Using system copy of such library might cause 
unexpected behavior of JDK.
3. Also using system copies of libraries might be unreliable, and thus 
some bugs could arise that we do not expect. This situation would be 
difficult as it would not be clear whether it's an OpenJDK fault, or the 
library fault. At least until we've got an ability to retrieve some 
specific options (like EXTERNAL_LIBPNG) that were used while building 
OpenJDK from the run-time version (i.e. something like a switch 'java 
-Xprintconfigoptions').

So, even taking into account that the patch does not change the default 
behavior, we think that the number of problems it could bring is to big. 
What do you think about these reasons? And, what's more important, what, 
in your opinion, is the main reason for such an addition to OpenJDK?

--
best regards,
Anthony


On 05/12/2007 12:04 AM Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> Trying to make OpenJDK more friendly for those distributions (like
> Gentoo and Debian iirc) having in their policy the use, whenever
> possible, of the system's libraries rather than internal copies of
> them, I've prepared three patches to AWT's libsplashscreen that allows
> to use the external/system copy of the three libraries in the subject.
> 
> The default behaviour is unchanged, you need to pass EXTERNAL_JPEG
> EXTERNAL_LIBPNG and EXTERNAL_GIFLIB with the value "true" to get them
> used.
> 
> Hope this helps,
>