Adapting IcedTea for the new OpenJDK build system (build-infra)

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> Hi IcedTea developers,
> 
> As some (most, I hope) of you know, we're about to replace the old
> build
> system in OpenJDK, with a completely rewritten build system, based on
> autoconf and more structured makefiles (the build-infra project).
> 
> This project is slowly but surely getting closer to delivery.
> 
> I don't know if anybody in the IcedTea community have tried out the
> new
> build system, or been thinking about how to integrate it with
> IcedTea's
> build system, but if not -- now would be a good time to start! :-) We
> still don't have any official dates, but it is likely that the switch
> to
> the new build system is at least not that many months away...
> 
> I'd be happy to assist in answering questions and helping out in
> making
> such an adaptation. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to dwelve
> into IcedTea right now to provide you with a complete patch, so (as
> usual) the burden of adapting IcedTea to the changes in OpenJDK falls
> on
> your community. Nevertheless, one of the driving ideas behind the
> change
> was to simplify building, so hopefully it should not be hard to get
> it
> to fit in in the IcedTea build process.
> 

I'm aware of the work, but haven't had chance to try it yet.  It's a change
that affects OpenJDK8 and our main focus has been on 6 & 7 so far, as that's
what we actually ship.

I do plan to start looking at it, but we need to be careful that we don't
regress in doing so i.e. we need to be able to produce an near-identical
image from the new build as we do now from the old one, and there are a lot
of required fixes on top that we're still in the process of upstreaming.

It also may be that we end up not needing IcedTea for 8 if enough work goes
upstream.  That's something we need to consider as well.

> /Magnus
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EC5A 1F5E C0AD 1D15 8F1F  8F91 3B96 A578 248B DC07