Will Webstart be integrated in OpenJDK?

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/9/11 Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>
>> The biggest problem at the moment is the JCK.  I'm quite happy for
>> Sun to use this to certify their own mashed-up proprietary/Free
>> builds inside Sun labs, and equally it's been great to see this
>> applied to a purely Free build by Red Hat.  However, what disturbed
>> me recently was seeing this used as a tool for patch approval during
>> the AWT/Swing/Java2D discussion Mario mentions.
>
> Why not?  A gcc patch that failed Plum Hall testing would be rejected
> too, assuming (or course) that the Plum Hall test was valid.
>

I'm not saying that ensuring a patch doesn't cause a regression with the
test suite is not important; on the contrary, I think it's very important and
wish it was more strongly enforced for GNU Classpath.

The problem is -- who's going to run the test suite?  Besides the legal problems
with the JCK (which I assume would also prevent any kind of public
continuous integration
testing), from what you say it is non-trivial to get this set up.
Should that be a requirement
on every possible contributor or should it be handled further up?

>> A Free project being dependent on a proprietary test suite for
>> patches is just as bad as it being dependent on proprietary tools to
>> build.  As Mark mentioned in reply to this, we should work towards
>> improving jtreg and Mauve to ensure a Free test suite is available
>> and not rely on the JCK.
>
> It's not going to happen.  The TCK tests a whole lot of minute details
> of Java language compatibility that are not fully explained in the
> Javadoc, and so any open test suite that does not derive from the TCK
> will not be complete.
>

Yes, unfortunately I don't see it happening either, but it's a
disturbing state of
affairs.  For one thing, such details not being documented is a
barrier to alternate
implementations and I can see why the TCK is restricted to derivations
of OpenJDK.

> Andrew.
>
-- 
Andrew :-)

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