Building OpenJDK libraries using IcedTea Project for JamVM

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:
> > This is by design. The IcedTea build is set to work with the versions
> > of JamVM and CACAO it has been tested with.
> 
> Must be the reason then why I've constantly been fighting for
> --with-cacao-src-dir :)
> 

Heh, well you're a slightly different case to an end-user; if you
build IcedTea with a newer CACAO and it fails, as a CACAO developer,
you probably have more idea than I do how to fix it.

We obviously can't test each release with every possible version of
CACAO and JamVM that users can throw at it. So we settle on one version.
The primary aim of the --with-x-src-zip options is not to allow alternate
zip files to be used, but to avoid downloading. This is necessary for
distro builds, which shouldn't be downloading files from the Internet,
and is also very helpful for people who build regularly and for setting
up autobuilders. They work in tandem with the --disable-downloading option
which will stop the file being downloaded if the referenced one is invalid.

The checksums are there to make sure the file is as expected, and avoids
bad downloads and mistakes in passing in the paths to the zip file. It also
means that we can catch cases where the build is updated, but not the zip files
(again, useful for autobuilders). I am thinking of adding an option to disable
the checking, but it's expected that someone who wants to take the risk of
using an unsupported zip is also capable of updating the checksum. There's
no need to alter the Makefile rules, so please don't do that.

If such updates are being done frequently, then the --with-x-src-dir options
are there to point to a source directory instead. This means that changes can
be tested without them even having to be committed anywhere. Again, it's
an option for developers. For end-users, we provide --enable-cacao, --enable-jamvm, etc.
so that they can just use that option and not have to worry about downloading
zip files, etc.

If there's a problem with the option itself, then, by all means, file a bug.
But we're not going to support bugs where a build fails because a version of
CACAO or JamVM other than the one supported is being used. If you want to
experiment with that, then you get to fix it as well ;)

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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