Build Infrastructure changes

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 18:49 Wed 03 Aug     , Mario Torre wrote:
> Il giorno mer, 03/08/2011 alle 12.39 -0400, mark.reinhold at oracle.com ha
> scritto:
> > 2011/8/3 12:25 -0400, kelly.ohair at oracle.com:
> > > ...
> > > 
> > > The autoconf setup may borrow ideas/patterns from the IcedTea project,
> > > and I want to give credit to that team for that work.
> > 
> > We're going to adopt autoconf?  Really?
> > 
> > - Mark
> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> I don't think this is completely a bad idea, autoconf could make cross
> compilation a bit easier.
> 

I think autoconf (or some other configure-like layer) is sorely needed to make
OpenJDK builds more amenable to new developers.  Knowing what to put in
all those make variables is difficult and some useful options can be
missed even by experienced developers.  Offering that in a configure-like
way would make things much better IMHO.

The other positive is I hope this will allow OpenJDK to become usable with system libraries,
which is less work for IcedTea to maintain.  Having a configure-like layer will
allow things like libjpeg, libpng, giflib, zlib, etc. to be detected rather than
forcing the use of outdated in-tree versions (though they'd still be an option
for those who want them).

> Cheers,
> Mario
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and IcedTea
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://icedtea.classpath.org
PGP Key: F5862A37 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EA30 D855 D50F 90CD F54D  0698 0713 C3ED F586 2A37