Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Kelly,

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 17:45 -0800, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> I'm just a small (maybe medium sized) cog in the machinery around
> here. ;^)

We small and medium sized cogs need to work together to turn this into a
well functioning coding machine!

> Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Priority one, we wanted to either open source or get open source
> replacements for the binary plugs (openjdk6 only has snmp left?).

About snmp. Do you happen to know an example program that uses this
functionality? That would probably encourage people to get free
replacement code to enable such an app. There are two (failing of
course) tests in the jtreg jdk suite. Are there any more tests that
could be liberated to help implementing this?

> Some sources have been slowly opened up, I think hotspot added the
> linux
> sparc sources which used to be closed sources.

Yes, that was very nice! IcedTea6 has this backported and various
GNU/Linux distros now come with a hotspot based sparc variant (I know of
at least Fedora and Debian).

> So some of the sources are moving to the open area as the review
> process and decisions are made. Yes, progress is slow, but it is
> progress.

And thanks a lot for all the progress. I don't want to sound as if I
don't see the enormous progress that is being made (and it really is
enormous, just the fact that 99% of the whole code base is out there is
probably one, if not the, largest liberation of formerly proprietary
code ever done!) The reason I do ask questions like these however is to
help form an inclusive community. It is hard for those outside Sun to
relate at times because there are no roadmaps for some of the progress
(and no idea if some of the remaining proprietary stuff will ever be
liberated or what the holdup really is). And no roadmap means we have no
idea if we are duplicating work or that we are accelerating it.

> The plugin remains the hot potato. I won't go there. :^(

I don't think that is a very high priority item since we have free
replacement code around already anyway that is shipped with all distros
now anyway. It could be improvement for sure, since it seems to be
missing some of the newer functionality. But basic applets and webstart
just work now. Lots of juicy bugs remain however for those wanting to
help improve it.

Cheers,

Mark