IcedTea Bootstrap Process

Sun Jan 18 18:15:09 PST 2009

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Andrew John Hughes <
gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:

> 2009/1/16 Kurt Miller <kurt at intricatesoftware.com>:
> > Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > True. At some point we will get to OpenJDK6 too. For now I'm following
> > the standard practice of following current/HEAD/tip to increase the
> > likelihood of our work making it in the main tree. If it turns out that
> > Sun isn't interested in merging BSD support into the main tree I would
> > expect that we will change our focus to OpenJDK6.
> >
>
> Fair enough.  I'm not aware of the current situation on *BSD at the
> moment, but I would assume that if an implementation is needed, 6
> would be the one to go for as has happened with the GNU/Linux distros
> (who understandably want to ship a certifiable complete implementation
> not a JDK with no specification as yet).

My original thought was similar, with BSD support and Zero we could get a
JDK 6 to MacOSX on PowerPC. I don't believe Apple plans to support the older
PowerPC platform with a 6 implementation.

>
>
> >> 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 open to any/all support that would allow me to work on open source
> > Java full time. I've not approached Apple or the FreeBSD Foundation
> > though. I know from past experience the FreeBSD Foundation prefers
> > to spend its $ on the certification process and looks to the community
> > for the rest of the heavy lifting. I don't have any contacts at Apple
> > so I wouldn't know where to start in attempting to approach them with
> > the idea.
> >
>
> Well the OpenJDK6 TCK process doesn't cost, though it is effectively a
> self-certification process.  In the same way that RedHat has, you
> and/or FreeBSD could work with the IcedTea community and certify
> resulting binaries.
>
> As to Mac OS X, I wasn't thinking of Apple, but the projects like
> Mac/DarwinPorts and fink that exist to provide FOSS packages.

This is an excellent idea.

>
> >>> 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.
> >
> > I wasn't thinking Sun would embrace supporting all the BSD's officially
> > with certified tested binaries. If that happened I would be pleasantly
> > surprised and happy. However, getting our work into the main tree would
> > help us keep up to date and reduce the mundane time of syncing our work
> > at intervals.
> >
> > In any case, predicting how things will play out doesn't serve much
> > purpose. For now I'm content working at refining our tree to the point
> > where a merge could happen.
> >
>
> Sorry, I'm not trying to attack your methods here. It's simply my
> impression that Sun may be against maintaining something in the main
> tree they don't support, but you probably have a better idea of the
> likelihood of it happening.
>
> >>
> >>>>> 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.
> >
> > I haven't been following those threads too closely. It looks like he
> > is hitting conflicts due to IcedTea trying to patch files that we needed
> > to change to add BSD support.
> >
>
> Yes, that's what I'm thinking too.
>
> > Its been a while since I looked at IcedTea closely. The last time was
> > probably six months ago. IIRC back then only a RedHat branch of gcc 4.3
> > contained the changes needed to build IcedTea. Is that still the case or
> > has the gcc/gcj support been merged into gcc mainline?
> >
>
> It was a RedHat backport to 4.1 that was required, prior to the
> release of 4.3.  Now 4.3 is available, normal GCC/GCJ can be used.
> It's also possible to use another Classpath VM, but you obviously need
> some way of bootstrapping.  The advantage of gcj is a Java
> implementation is not needed to build.
>
> > Regards,
> > -Kurt
> >
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Andrew :-)
>
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