<AWT Dev> Ideas about improved architecture of the generic Swing peers

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sat, 2008-09-06 at 13:54 +0200, Mario Torre wrote:
> Il giorno sab, 06/09/2008 alle 11.01 +0200, Roman Kennke ha scritto:
> > >   Because if you want to
> > > incorporate this toolkit to
> > > JDK you must have compatible behavior, LaF, and pass JCK.
> > 
> > I can solve the first two points (compatibility and LaF) but not the
> > last one :-)
> 
> Maybe you guys at Sun can do this for us, but I find it quite odd, maybe
> OpenJDK sponsored projects should have access to the JCK?
> 
> I think it's important to do this while we develop the software so we
> can fix problems in realtime, especially design issues, because we then
> have to live with them, I don't want to do the wrong thing here.

Yeah, requiring passing a proprietary closed, legally troublesome
testsuite only available under NDA is somewhat odd for contributions to
an open free software community project. The JCK is proprietary and
access is only granted under NDA so it is impossible to share tests and
code snippets from it with the rest of the community. It seems only fair
that someone that wants to require JCK passing does the testing
themselves and rewrites any failing tests for the community contributors
so you can at least share those publicly with others on the mailinglists
and everybody can see and verify the reasons why certain design
decisions have been taken.

The current proprietary nature of the JCK also prevents most distros
from running it since their build systems are public. So running the TCK
can only be done afterward by another entity that has some proprietary
closed secret setup on the binaries. Which is really a bit too late for
a community project. (Luckily most distros do run the mauve and
integrated jtreg tests now for each build of icedtea.)

So I agree that all this sounds a bit odd. We really should start
working on some way to make new TCK tests (for JDK7 at least) added as
free software (to either the standard jtreg or mauve suite) so they can
be shared like the rest of OpenJDK. So that we will no longer be dragged
down by the current proprietary NDA JCK setup.

Cheers,

Mark