IcePick

[Andrew John Hughes]

On Saturday 16 June 2007 18:46, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Fri, 2007-06-15 at 21:21 +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> > To cut a long story short, I've succeeded in cobbling together a small
> > autoconf build system that will pluck through the OpenJDK sources and
> > build them (just javac, javadoc, javah and apt so far, as a proof of
> > concept -- but more should be easy enough to add now the main work's
> > done).  It creates a tools.jar and scripts to run them (just like those
> > in Classpath).  I was wondering if it would be worth me cleaning this up
> > a little (adding niceties like a README, etc.) and hosting it with the
> > rest of the IcedTea stuff.
>
> Nice. This sounds very useful. How "portable" is the result? Is it
> completely self-contained or do the tools depend on some of the internal
> openjdk library implementations (can I use them with gcj for example)?
>

It seems portable.  Personally, I run the resulting tools with cacao and GNU 
Classpath and it has worked fine so far.  I've just managed to build most of 
JikesRVM using the tools.jar (Ant tries to use this by default, which is what 
inspired me in the first place).  I've also succeeded in compiling apt to 
native from the result, but it failed to run due to my gcj being outdated (it 
doesn't have the javac hacks we added yet) -- I need to build a new one at 
some point.

> I think it would be a nice addition to the icedtea build system if you
> can make it easy to integrate. IcedTea is already kind of a build
> harness for openjdk, if there is an option to easily build just the
> tools with it that would be helpful imho, if only for those people who
> just want to hack on and build the tools. Or maybe the openjdk
> tools-group (is there such a thing?) would be interested. Although I
> believe Dalibor already had a plan of autoconfiscating javac and the
> team said they already had enough different build options. Alternatively
> if nobody want to integrate your patches we can always create a new repo
> (icepick) for you to make it easy to publish your stuff and have a
> development repository.
>

My initial thought was a separate repository, because I've assumed the goals 
of the two are fairly different, but united under the banner of interaction 
between GNU Classpath and IcedTea.  My understanding of IcedTea (having not 
had chance to build it myself yet) is that it patches and then uses OpenJDK's 
build system, whereas what I have here merely compiles the sources from the 
OpenJDK tree, putting the result in its own tree and not touching OpenJDK's 
build system at all (although that was my reference for some of the tricky 
parts).

I could do with talking to Dalibor about his plans at some point (probably 
when I next catch him on IRC) as it does seem there may be an overlap there.  
He mentioned sending me some of the work he'd done at some point, but I 
haven't seen anything yet.

> Any patches or source available?
>

At the moment, I've got away with just an autoconf build system.  As I 
incorporate more tools though, patches may be necessary.

> Cheers,
>
> Mark

Cheers,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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