Ability to override compiler from environment

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Dimitri,

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 08:45 -0700, Dmitri Trembovetski wrote:
> 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.

O yes, you are right. We should of course first make sure the build only
uses free tools. Using the proprietary studio tools would be no fun and
kind of defeat the whole purpose of icedtea.

> > 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).

You post patches and review the code, have various hackers and
autobuilders build and run the code and if a regression does slip
through you revert it till all primary platforms supported work with a
correct patch. Of course it depends on there being enough hackers around
for each primary platform to catch any issues for that platform. But
that is always the case isn't it? It seems that in the case of OpenJDK
and Windows at the moment there are still seem enough people interested
and using it as their primary development platform to keep it working.

Cheers,

Mark