VisualVM in IcedTea6

[Andrew John Hughes]

2008/7/30 Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> Lillian Angel wrote:
>> Andrew Haley wrote:
>>> Lillian Angel wrote:
>>>
>>>>> 2008/7/30 Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com>
>>>
>>>>> Have to say I wondered what was going on when I saw the
>>>>> ChangeLog entry, and I still don't understand the reasoning.
>>>>> Is there a reason this has to be built WITH the VM?  If it's a
>>>>> truly separate application, then building them against each
>>>>> other is a job for a distro.  Otherwise, the next logical step
>>>>> is --with-eclipse, --with-jboss, --with-glassfish, etc.
>
>>>> VisualVM is a tool we would eventually like to ship with
>>>> IcedTea/OpenJDK.
>
>>> In the same package?  I can't see any reason it should be.  The IcedTea
>>> package might usefully be made more fine-grained, not less.
>

I agree.  Packaging VisualVM separately and optionally building
against a system-installed
copy (like we do with Rhino) is one thing and an option I can support.
 Downloading three
tarballs full of unknown code as part of building IcedTea is another
and one I can not.

>> JDK 6 Update 7 was recently released with Java VisualVM included. I
>> suspect it  may eventually be included in OpenJDK. No extra sources have
>> been included in the IcedTea repository, so size should not be an issue.
>> The only changes are to the Makefile/configure files.
>
> Sure, but ATM if you want to build VisualVM you have to build OpenJDK,
> right?  If so, that is a Bad Thing.
>

The proprietary JDKs also ship with a few other things in place that
aren't in OpenJDK
like Rhino, JavaDB/Derby etc.  They generally have more of an 'dump
it in any old folder and it will work' mentality, whereas I'd expect
IcedTea to work
more like a good FOSS package; support the minimum requirements, and optionally
build against any appropriate system-installed components.  I would
have thought this
would be better from a distro perspective too.  I know I don't want it
downloading more
stuff during the Gentoo ebuild - I'm already wondering how to handle
CACAO in this
respect.

>> We do have the option of shipping this as a separate package when the
>> time comes.
>
> Why not now?  Even if the thing is to be shipped as part of OpenJDK, why
> build it with OpenJDK?
>

Seconded.  Please just set up a Mercurial tree for this on
icedtea.classpath.org and
package it separately.

> Andrew.
>
>


Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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