encumbrances update

[Ted Neward]

Well... several thoughts come to mind:

(1) The fact that OpenJDK was not aiming to be buildable on Windows from the
beginning was definitely NOT clear, at least not to me.
(2) The fact that it would be viewed as acceptable to release the source in
an unbuildable form on any of the "supported" platforms--Windows, Linux,
Solaris--surprises me. I accepted the idea that it was unbuildable as I
thought it was a temporary break, to be fixed "real soon now", not an
acceptable state of affairs.
(3) The idea that Windows is not as important as Linux or Solaris is a
dangerous idea, IMHO. It essentially suggests that Sun is throwing away a
whole legion of developers who work on Windows and would want to contribute
patches and suggestions for improving the Java-Windows experience. IMHO, the
success of .NET due in no small part to the fairly substantive gap between
Java and Windows.
(4) I don't want to suggest in any way that I'm unhappy with the progress
made by you (Kelly) or any of the other build team developers--having
wrestled with other build systems in the past, I'm stunned at the size of
building the JVM, and awed at the fact that it works at all, much less on
systems that aren't tightly locked down in terms of tools and filesystem
layout. (I worked at Intuit for a while, on Quicken 5, and there you got to
choose what drive letter the code would be installed on--several guys had
external SCSI drives they took with them to work from home--but beyond that,
everything had to look "just like this".) I said it publicly on my blog, I
said it to Simon Phipps during an interview with him at OSCon (which is
going up on iTunes), I'll say it again here: you guys are doing a DAMN
impressive job.
(5) It's kinda all moot--I did a fresh re-fetch from SVN for the b17 drop,
used Ivan's build of the freetype DLL, and it all builds, both debug and
fastdebug.

So yes, Dan, somebody outside of Sun managed to make it work on Windows. :-)

Ted Neward
Java, .NET, XML Services
Consulting, Teaching, Speaking, Writing
http://www.tedneward.com
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: build-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net [mailto:build-dev-
> bounces at openjdk.java.net] On Behalf Of Kelly O'Hair
> Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 10:22 AM
> To: Dan Fabulich
> Cc: discuss at openjdk.java.net; Anthony Petrov; Phil Race; Igor
> Nekrestyanov; build-dev at openjdk.java.net
> Subject: Re: encumbrances update
> 
> I thought it was clear from the beginning, perhaps I wasn't making this
> as well known as I should. If so, my aplogies.
> 
> It was never expected that the initial OpenJDK source drops would be
> buildable
> on Windows. We focused on Linux and OpenSolaris and purposely left out
> Windows due to the t2k issue, and knowing that the team working on this
> was very close to removing it as a dependence, we felt this was
> justfified.
> So that fact that it has never built on Windows was well known, I
> thought.
> 
> While I was trying to make t2k.lib available in the binary plugs,
> another team
> was busy trying to remove it completely. So you can't say we haven't
> been trying
> to deal with this issue.
> 
> It is pretty impossible to guarantee builds will be successful in all
> possible configurations, but once we get past the basic issues, we will
> do regular test builds of OpenJDK on Windows. But speaking from years
> of
> experience, Windows is a difficult platform to get consistent and
> reliable.
> Just because we can build on Windows isn't worth as much as saying it
> for
> Linux or OpenSolaris.
> 
> -kto
> 
> Dan Fabulich wrote:
> > Igor Nekrestyanov wrote:
> >
> >> Of course i've tested these changes on all platforms including both
> 32
> >> and 64 bit Windows. It is "believed to build and work" because we
> had
> >> not performed full testing of openjdk binaries and we know that
> build
> >> can be fragile due to different build environments.
> >
> > I'm sure you've tested your changes in your build, and maybe that's
> all
> > I can ask for, but I'm pretty sure the same could have been said of
> all
> > of the previous builds, including the code drop we got in May and
> every
> > build since, all of which, we know, don't work for anyone who isn't
> > @sun.com (due to at least one missing file).
> >
> >> My tests are not "ideal" for number of reasons:
> >> 2) I was using binary plugs created from my personal workspace.
> >>      I believe they should be the same as those to be published with
> >> b17 code drop but this is my assumption.
> >
> > We know for certain that this assumption is FALSE.  No binary plug
> given
> > to the public has ever built successfully on Windows; since your
> > personal plugs have been working for you for months, we can conclude
> > that there's something critically different between your plugs and
> the
> > plugs we get.
> >
> > But who knows?  Maybe we'll get lucky this time.  :-)
> >
> >> BTW, for windows build you will need to build freetype.dll (i tried
> >> only dll built with visualc). I believe that freetype build system
> >> does not generate .dll on windows and therefore some manual tweaking
> >> of freetype makefiles (and sources) might be necessary.
> >
> > Sounds like fun! :-)  Will the documentation include a patch?  Or
> just
> > some tips on how to make a .DLL?  What source files needed to change?
> >
> > -Dan
> 
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