IcedTea Bootstrap Process

[Kurt Miller]

Hello Andrew,

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 2009/1/15 Eric Richardson <ekrichardson at gmail.com>:
>> 2. It seems that there are tons of makefile changes and such brewing on the
>> bsd-ports list that might help us on Mac OS X. What is the mechanism for
>> these to flow into Icedtea?
>>
> 
> There isn't one at present.  I think it makes a lot of sense to
> support *BSD in IcedTea proper (including 6).  CCing to the BSD
> developers to see if they have any thoughts on this.

Basically it comes down to lack of resources. If I could work full time
on bsd-java many things could be considered like merging our work. With
the available time I have I would like to work towards getting bsd
support included in the main tree.

I'm not sure you know this but I've been working on bsd java support
with Sun's JVM for about five years and Greg a few years more then that.
We have merged and merged and merged our work countless times as the JDK
has moved forward. There are about 250 individual files that are patched
to add bsd support. Getting these into the main tree would save us
countless hours of future merging and free us to work on improving the
port with our open-source time.

>> 3. Are there some simple tasks I can do such as patch diffs or something on
>> patches that won't apply?
>>
> 
> You'll need to do that locally.  I'm not sure how much help
> contributing these back will be until we know how to proceed with
> this, especially as some will just be because the BSD tree is some old
> OpenJDK7 version.

Actually the bsd-port tree is not old, I'm not sure why you thought that.

Regards,
-Kurt