IcedTea Bootstrap Process

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/1/16 Kurt Miller <kurt at intricatesoftware.com>:
> 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 see your point and agree whole-heartedly.  The issue is that there
are in effect two main trees: the OpenJDK6 tree (which is being used,
patched by IcedTea6, in many GNU/Linux distributions) and the OpenJDK7
tree which the BSD tree is currently pulling from.  The problem with 7
is that, while it gets a lot more TLC from Sun, it could be a couple
of years before we see 7 replacing 6 for users and this ties BSD
support to the same timeline.  For me, it would be nice to see *BSD
support sooner than that.

Has there been any thought about support from the various BSD
distributions and the Free stuff that runs on top of Mac OS X?

> 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.

Yes I am aware of this and I'd also like to see things change.
However, I'm not sure getting it into the OpenJDK7 tree would help
anything, unless Sun are also intending to test and ship their own
binaries for BSD platforms.

>
>>> 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.
>

Sorry, I should have been clearer.  I haven't looked at the BSD tree
myself but the problems Eric was seeing suggest that the sources he's
using from the BSD tree are either outdated or have changed for the
BSD port, causing the patches to not apply.  In reality, the cause for
each patch may be one of these or even both.

> Regards,
> -Kurt
>

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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