Re: IcedTea 1.12.5 windows build errors

[Jacob Wisor]

Hello there!

> I'm interesting in maintaining windows builds for IcedTea, is it
> possible to have windows-specific changes upstreamed into IcedTea?

This is great! I have cought up on your progress building IcedTea for/on Windows. I am also very interested in having a supported "official" binary release of IcedTea for Windows. Should you need any help in adjusting or simplifying the build process on Windows, I would be glad to help. Just to avoid any confusion, I am not currently interested in maintaing an IcedTea release for Windows, mainly because I lack the experience and sometimes expertise to do that. I would like to have official binary releases that ordinary users or admins can grab, install and run productively. I would also like to make adjustments to the build process, so that IcedTea can be relatively easily build on Windows with open-source tools (as one of IcedTea project's main goals states), mainly native tools (no dependency on cygwin neither at build nor at run time). Furthermore, I would like to provide an MSI installer for an IcedTea binary release.

> Yes, to make clear the whole current process:
> 1) run "./configure" on debian wheezy amd64
> 2) run "make" (from the same icedtea dir), wait for all icedtea
> patches applied, abort build
> 3) copy "openjdk" dir to windows box
> 4) apply windows-specific patches, run windows build as a normal
> openjdk6 control build

As I see it, this build process is far too complicated (still, thank you for doing this aweful work). :) That said, I asume those patches only apply to IcedTea's code, not the build process? 
Regarding the build procees, I would even propose to go as far as to convert the build process to an ant-driven project (or provide side-by-side), well-knowing this may sound as heresy to some people and being unsure whether this is possible at all. Well, the benefits of that should be pretty obvious, so will not elaborate on that.
Anyway, it would be nice to work something out.

Regards,
Jacob