RFR: 7113349 JDK8 port to macosx

[Stuart Marks]

On 3/5/12 12:52 PM, Stephen Bannasch wrote:
> At 4:05 PM +0000 3/5/12, Michael McMahon wrote:
>> I'm still having problems reproducing this, even with the same boot JDK you are using.
>
> I've reproduced John's error on 10.6.8 applying webrev.4 on top of jdk8/tl.
>
> The error occurs running ./test_gamma:
>    ...
>    echo "Doing vm.make build:"
>    Doing vm.make build:
>    All done.
>    cd bsd_amd64_compiler2/product&&  ./test_gamma
>    Using java runtime at: /Users/stephen/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0_04-2012_03_04.jdk/Contents/Home/jre
>    Error occurred during initialization of VM
>    java.lang.NullPointerException
>   	at java.util.Hashtable.put(Hashtable.java:432)
>   	at java.lang.System.initProperties(Native Method)
>   	at java.lang.System.initializeSystemClass(System.java:1115)

OK, I think I figured it out. It's our old friend LANG.

Earlier in this thread, John had observed

> The NPE is because libjava.dylib is handing a null value to Hashtable, for the key "user.language", in System.c.

The user.language property comes from (or at least is related to) the LANG 
environment variable. If LANG is unset, I get this crash in test_gamma. If LANG 
is set to en_US.UTF-8 the build succeeds.

Curiously, with LANG=en_US.UTF-8, the build log says

   WARNING: LANG has been set to en_US.UTF-8, this can cause build failures.
            Try setting LANG to 'C'.

but the build succeeds. There is no corresponding warning if LANG is unset. :-(

Also curiously, the jdk7u build on Mac doesn't have the same sensitivity to the 
absence of LANG. I'll try this out on other platforms.

I'm not sure, but it could be that this problem is unrelated to Michael's 
changes. If so, then sorry for the noise. But at least we might have gotten a 
lead on some other build mysteries.

s'marks