Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Martin Buchholz]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:27, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
> As an example of the cost of building on old boxes, OpenJDK contains
> prototypes for epoll(7) that are incorrect for some arches.  These

We are changing the subject slightly from portability of binaries
to portability of sources.

> prototypes exist because epoll didn't come into existence before
> Kernel 2.6(ish), and OpenJDK was being built on an old box, so the
> prototypes were copied from the kernel headers on (I think) an x86
> box.  This bug causes bizarre and hard to debug behaviour on non-x86
> arches.
>
> At some point you have to get rid of cruft like this.  If not now,
> when?

Obviously opinions differ on how long to support older platforms.

"Kids these days..." think 2 years is old.

When I was maintaining an open source project,
I tried to maintain a portability horizon of at least 10 years.
Seriously.  I would like people to be able to build my
software on that old Irix machine they picked up at a
garage sale.

For problems like changing prototypes, we have configure.

Sure the following example is ugly cruft,
but we can wait one more decade before nuking it.

dnl If `getpgrp' takes no argument (the POSIX.1 version), define
dnl `GETPGRP_VOID'.  Otherwise, it is the BSD version, which takes a
dnl process ID as an argument.
AC_CHECK_FUNCS(getpgrp)
AC_FUNC_GETPGRP

Martin