Is bootstripping with gcj and classpath really nesserary?

[Andrew Haley]

Yuhong Bao writes:
 > 
 > > It's bootstrapping, and building on OpenJDK would make IcedTea unfree
 > > (because OpenJDK has binary plugs), which defeats the point.
 > 
 > I mean using a binary of IcedTea to bootstrap themselves.

That works, but you have to start from somewhere.  

If you are bulding for a free operating system like Fedora or Debian,
you have to start with a bunch of source code and some free software
and then build a binary package.  We can't build IcedTea with unfree
software and install that on Fedora, because we then could not prove
that IcedTea wasn't derived from unfree software.  It might turn out,
by accident, that IcedTea contained binary components from the unfree
JDK that was used to bootstrap it.  That would be a very Bad Thing.

In the future it won't be necessary to bootstrap with Classpath and
gcj.

Andrew.

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