Ability to override compiler from environment

[Dmitri Trembovetski]

   Hi Mark,

Mark Wielaard wrote:
>>> I agree, but I have understood that this work has been done in IcedTea 
>>> already.  Is there any estimate when these two codebases may converge?
>>    Does IcedTea configure+make model work on platforms other than
>>    linux? OpenJDK has to be built at least on Solaris and Windows.
>>
>>    It's my understanding that Windows is the greatest pain in
>>    terms of build environment.
> 
> It should work on (open)solaris, but I haven't tried myself. I doubt

   I doubt that it would work out of the box since on solaris we use
   SunStudio compilers and not gcc so that would need to be
   addressed by the configure script. I doubt that we'll be switching
   to gcc for solaris compilation any time soon.

> anybody ever tried it on windows. In theory with cygwin you should be
> able to get enough of the gnu toolchain to get it working. But icedtea

   Theories seldom work well when applied to Windows, unfortunately,
   as Kelly would attest. But I guess we won't know until we try.

> autotools support was also added to make bootstrapping through other
> libre java implementations like gcj possible. The cygwin gcj port
> however is, as far as I know, still a version behind the version we
> really need (including 1.5 language support). That said, there is a
> --with-openjdk configure flag that should in theory work as soon as you
> have an pre-existing openjdk build already. But we would indeed need
> testers for that platform. For some reason it isn't a very popular
> development platform for Free Software hackers.

   How the Free Software hackers would ensure that their changes
   to the shared code in the openjdk don't break Windows if they
   never build or test there? Unfortunately that could easily
   happen (and did in the past).

   Thanks,
     Dmitri