Somewhat wonkier Windows problem

[Anthony Petrov]

Hi Volker,

I agree completely. As I wrote in my reply to David - fixes in this area 
are very much welcome. Adding additional and/or alternative instructions 
and tips to the BUILD-README file is also a fix, btw.

--
best regards,
Anthony

On 05/23/13 18:00, Volker Simonis wrote:
> Hi Anthony,
>
> I think what David is really objecting here is that the current build
> requirements for building OpenJDK 8 on Windows as described in the
> official build documentation can not be easily fulfilled by anybody
> outside Oracle (because of age-old dependencies which simply aren't
> publicly available anymore and which can not be easily provided by the
> OpenJDK project itself because of licensing issues - e.g. "DirectX 9.0
> SDK Update Summer 2004", Cygwin 1.7.16, etc...).
>
> Of course it is possible to finally build with almost any combination of
> tools and libraries given that you invest enough time and resources and
> of course after you succeed in doing so you got wiser a little bit. But
> that's not the point! Ideally, everybody should be able to get the
> required build dependencies as easy as the JDK sources and after
> installing them as described in the build documentation he should be
> able to build. That's currently not the case - at least not on Windows!
>
> The problem is that Oracle nails down the build requirements years
> before a Java version is released and these requirements are carved into
> stone in the official build documentation. That's perfectly fine for a
> commercially released product which has to run on a variety of different
> platforms and which has to be supported for a long period of time - but
> not for an OpenSource project!
>
> I've been criticized for my suggestion to put (at least a part of) the
> build documentation into a Wiki in order to get a chance to update it
> more dynamically. From a software engineering standpoint that criticism
> was perfectly valid. From a pragmatic point of view perhaps not. Anyway
> - if we want to keep the build instructions in the repository in a
> central document (which is good!), than this document should really
> reflect the current situation and not the the instructions how Oracle
> once decided to build its derived, commercial product. I understand that
> Oracle may not want to be responsible to provide such a kind of document
> and that's perfectly fine. After all this is an open source project so
> the community may have to be involved here - we just have to make this
> fact clear to anybody.
>
> Currently, unfortunately,  all these notable Windows build adventures
> more than often lead to a dead-end (just browse the mailing lists!) or
> at best in a blog entry which describes a special, working setup (been
> there several time myself:)
>
> Nevertheless David, you have my full moral support!
>
> Regards,
> Volker
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Anthony Petrov
> <anthony.petrov at oracle.com <mailto:anthony.petrov at oracle.com>> wrote:
>
>     David,
>
>     I pretty much understand the problem you're trying to solve. I
>     recall myself in 2006-2007 when I was eagerly wanting to build
>     (then) JDK 6 with VS2005 while we officially used VS2003. It was
>     fun. :) Later on we ended up switching to VS2010 for JDK7, however
>     some results of my work still were useful and relevant, and they
>     made their way to the JDK repo (some make files changes,
>     command-line options for the compiler, minor code changes, etc.)
>
>     So if you come up with some useful fixes for our new build system
>     and/or sources to provide better support for newer
>     compilers/libraries - it's great!
>
>     FWIW, I did build JDK8 with VS2012 back in Oct/Nov last year. I've
>     run a few GUI demo apps (SwingSet2 and friends) and they all worked
>     just fine. Only some make files needed some minor updates in order
>     to learn to use the new compilers. Overall, switching from VS2010 to
>     VS2012 shouldn't be hard.
>
>     --
>     best regards,
>     Anthony
>
>
>     On 05/23/13 16:47, David Chase wrote:
>
>         I think you need to understand the problem I'm after --
>         currently, our public instructions for third-party OpenJDK (8)
>         builds don't work.
>         They don't build at all, so porting is completely out of the
>         question.  I'm trying to come up with instructions that will at
>         least build something that will run on the machine where it is
>         built.
>
>         Regarding the DirectX compatibility, that sounds like something
>         we should be repairing in the builds, so that we can cut our
>         dependence on a 9-year-old release of the DirectX SDK.
>
>         Note also that some of these newer DirectX SDKs (certainly April
>         2006) will mess up your %PATH% by inserting elements on it that
>         include quoted strings, and those you will need to remove
>         manually.  I will do the experiment to see if the 2010 release
>         does not do this, since "repair your path after installing
>         required software" is a good step not to have in any build process.
>
>         On 2013-05-23, at 8:08 AM, Anthony
>         Petrov<anthony.petrov at oracle.__com
>         <mailto:anthony.petrov at oracle.com>>  wrote:
>
>             Binaries built with VS2012 won't run on WinXP. You need
>             VS2012sp1 to make them compatible with XP.
>
>             Yes, we don't officially support JDK8 on Windows XP.
>             However, there's a difference between _not supported_ and
>             _just won't run_.
>
>             Hence, if we ever decide to switch to VS2012, we'll most
>             likely want to use VS2012sp1+.
>
>
>