Support for Netscape/Mozilla plug-in on Linux AMD64 native platform

[David Herron]

Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Kurt Miller wrote:
>> On Monday 29 October 2007 8:51:11 am Massimo Perga wrote:  
>>> Hello All,
>>>   I'm writing here to know what's the best process to follow in 
>>> order to
>>> have more informations on such a plug-in. I'm not requesting it... 
>>> rather,
>>> I'm *offering* to port the current 32-bit Linux version to a native 
>>> 64-bit
>>> version. To accomplish this task, which is the project that takes 
>>> care of
>>> such a plug-in ? Otherwise, have I to request a new project ?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> Regards,
>>>   Max     
>> Myself and Jung-uk Kim have completed making the plugin 64-bit
>> clean for the 1.6 JRL licensed plugin. You can find our work in patchset
>> 2 for BSD:
>>
>> http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/JDK16JRLConfirm.html
>>   
> On an unrelated note, would it make sense to create infrastructure for
> the porting projects inside OpenJDK? I am wondering if we shouldn't
> create an official 'porters' group, with projects for ports to *BSD, etc.
>
> While Sun may not be interested in merging in all such ports into the
> main OpenJDK tree, it could be useful to have the patch sets maintained
> centrally as part of the OpenJDK infrastructure. The distributed 
> mercurial
> setup could give us that liberty, I think.
>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic
I'm very much in agreement with any move in this direction.

I have a concern which I've heard some people inside Sun speak.  
Namely:  Who will be responsible for the quality of these ports?

At the meeting we held at FOSDEM I remember the lecture we had in the 
operation of the GCC project and how they go about supporting lots of 
CPU architecture and OS platform combinations.  On the one hand I think 
the OpenJDK has the potential to have that same breadth of platform 
support.  But if it's at the cost of the Sun quality engineering team it 
will not work. 

I think hosting a project like this has to be coupled with a plan for 
maintaining quality in that project. 

- David Herron