<Swing Dev> Binary files in Nimbus

[Andrew John Hughes]

>Peter,
>
>Earlier today you pushed Nimbus into the JDK 7 Swing forest [1].  I'm
>happy to see Nimbus get in, but later on the #openjdk IRC channel Andrew
>Hughes pointed out that the changes include seven binary jar files [2].
>
>When we open-sourced JDK 7 we took great pains to eliminate all binary
>files from the source tree, and as a matter of policy they are no longer
>allowed.  In retrospect we could've communicated this more often and more
>widely, and we'll certainly do that going forward.  I'm also going to
>look into enhancing the jcheck extension to check for binary files.
>
>In the meantime, we need to get rid of these jar files.  I suggest that
>the best route forward is for me to do a rollback of the Nimbus changeset
>on the server side and then for you to rework the code so that these jar
>files are no longer required.
>
>I'd still like to see Nimbus in M3, and I'll support integration into a
>later build as long as it's okay with SQE, but removing these jar files
>is a higher priority.  Aside from the fact that they're binary files,
>some of them contain code that has not been approved by Sun Legal for
>inclusion in OpenJDK.
>
>If anyone sees a problem with this plan, please let me know ASAP.
>
>- Mark
>
>
>[1] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/swing/jdk/rev/c5cd40f1f596
>[2] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/swing/jdk/file/c5cd40f1f596/make/tools/swing-nimbus/libs/

My thanks to Mark for raising this.  Blobs of unknown JAR code have
been a problem in the past for including OpenJDK in the GNU/Linux
distributions, and it would be a shame to take a backwards step on
this.
These ones do just appear to be http://jibx.sourceforge.net/, so
providing some way to point to the JAR files instead should be
sufficient.  awt16.jar can be dumped, given OpenJDK (AFAIR) is
supposed to be built with a 1.6 JDK.

On the positive side, the patch applies to OpenJDK6 with a few simple
modifications, and by copying across the JAR files manually to
make/tools/swing-nimbus/libs, I was able to build with the following
patch:

https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/show_bug.cgi?id=100037

So anyone wanting to try Nimbus on OpenJDK6 today, feel free :)
-- 
Andrew :-)

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

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net)
Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA  7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8