IcedTea Bootstrap Process

[Kurt Miller]

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 2009/1/16 Kurt Miller <kurt at intricatesoftware.com>:
>> Hello Andrew,
>>
>> Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>>> 2009/1/15 Eric Richardson <ekrichardson at gmail.com>:
>>>> 2. It seems that there are tons of makefile changes and such brewing on the
>>>> bsd-ports list that might help us on Mac OS X. What is the mechanism for
>>>> these to flow into Icedtea?
>>>>
>>> There isn't one at present.  I think it makes a lot of sense to
>>> support *BSD in IcedTea proper (including 6).  CCing to the BSD
>>> developers to see if they have any thoughts on this.
>> Basically it comes down to lack of resources. If I could work full time
>> on bsd-java many things could be considered like merging our work. With
>> the available time I have I would like to work towards getting bsd
>> support included in the main tree.
>>
> 
> I see your point and agree whole-heartedly.  The issue is that there
> are in effect two main trees: the OpenJDK6 tree (which is being used,
> patched by IcedTea6, in many GNU/Linux distributions) and the OpenJDK7
> tree which the BSD tree is currently pulling from.  The problem with 7
> is that, while it gets a lot more TLC from Sun, it could be a couple
> of years before we see 7 replacing 6 for users and this ties BSD
> support to the same timeline.  For me, it would be nice to see *BSD
> support sooner than that.

True. At some point we will get to OpenJDK6 too. For now I'm following
the standard practice of following current/HEAD/tip to increase the
likelihood of our work making it in the main tree. If it turns out that
Sun isn't interested in merging BSD support into the main tree I would
expect that we will change our focus to OpenJDK6.

> Has there been any thought about support from the various BSD
> distributions and the Free stuff that runs on top of Mac OS X?

I'm open to any/all support that would allow me to work on open source
Java full time. I've not approached Apple or the FreeBSD Foundation
though. I know from past experience the FreeBSD Foundation prefers
to spend its $ on the certification process and looks to the community
for the rest of the heavy lifting. I don't have any contacts at Apple
so I wouldn't know where to start in attempting to approach them with
the idea.

>> I'm not sure you know this but I've been working on bsd java support
>> with Sun's JVM for about five years and Greg a few years more then that.
>> We have merged and merged and merged our work countless times as the JDK
>> has moved forward. There are about 250 individual files that are patched
>> to add bsd support. Getting these into the main tree would save us
>> countless hours of future merging and free us to work on improving the
>> port with our open-source time.
> 
> Yes I am aware of this and I'd also like to see things change.
> However, I'm not sure getting it into the OpenJDK7 tree would help
> anything, unless Sun are also intending to test and ship their own
> binaries for BSD platforms.

I wasn't thinking Sun would embrace supporting all the BSD's officially
with certified tested binaries. If that happened I would be pleasantly
surprised and happy. However, getting our work into the main tree would
help us keep up to date and reduce the mundane time of syncing our work
at intervals.

In any case, predicting how things will play out doesn't serve much
purpose. For now I'm content working at refining our tree to the point
where a merge could happen.

> 
>>>> 3. Are there some simple tasks I can do such as patch diffs or something on
>>>> patches that won't apply?
>>>>
>>> You'll need to do that locally.  I'm not sure how much help
>>> contributing these back will be until we know how to proceed with
>>> this, especially as some will just be because the BSD tree is some old
>>> OpenJDK7 version.
>> Actually the bsd-port tree is not old, I'm not sure why you thought that.
>>
> 
> Sorry, I should have been clearer.  I haven't looked at the BSD tree
> myself but the problems Eric was seeing suggest that the sources he's
> using from the BSD tree are either outdated or have changed for the
> BSD port, causing the patches to not apply.  In reality, the cause for
> each patch may be one of these or even both.

I haven't been following those threads too closely. It looks like he
is hitting conflicts due to IcedTea trying to patch files that we needed
to change to add BSD support.

Its been a while since I looked at IcedTea closely. The last time was
probably six months ago. IIRC back then only a RedHat branch of gcc 4.3
contained the changes needed to build IcedTea. Is that still the case or
has the gcc/gcj support been merged into gcc mainline?

Regards,
-Kurt