On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 13:59 -0400, Elliot Lee wrote: > Maybe it's time to start the brainstorming for Fedora Core 5 and Fedora > Extras 5 - what major features are you willing to put effort into? We should ship a GCC 4.1 preview compiler so we can continue to demonstrate improvements on the java front. Most of the improvements of late imply ABI breakage because we're extending the library in incompatible ways. Restricting ourselves to non-ABI-breaking changes in GCC 4.0.x limits our ability to continue to demonstrate innovation. I also blogged about my personal ideas for java in FC5 recently, reproduced below..... Fedora Core 4 is getting close to “done", and I think it’s safe to say that we hit the Free java trifecta in this release: OpenOffice.org 2, the Eclipse IDE, and Apache Tomcat. Congratulations to everybody who made this possible! But what next? FC5 is right around the corner… My personal wish list is as follows: gcjwebplugin, Azureus and RSSOwl. Michael Koch’s gcjwebplugin is important for obvious reasons. I’m less worried about the GUI work here than the security work. I’d rather see us ship a secure plugin that could only run a handful of applets than nothing at all. Let’s put security work ahead of AWT/Swing. Azureus is a wildly popular and innovative cross-platform and extensible bittorrent client. It seems to be a permanent fixture on the Most Active and Top Downloaded lists at sourceforge.net (#1 on both this week). There are lots of plugins for it, including some to let it act as a powerful podcasting client (which is where my interest lies). It uses SWT and almost runs out of the box on gcj today. I posted a screenshot of it stumbling along on gcj about 6 months ago. The current release fails to run for a number of reasons, including their use of com.sun.* classes for secure sockets. This is a common problem (witness OpenOffice.org) and Sven de Marothy has been maintaining a nice page to help educate people on writing portable code. We need to promote this better. Like Azureus, RSSOwl is an SWT based app that almost runs today. It’s a popular and well reviewed RSS feed reader. Sven de Marothy and Robin Green (no relation, btw) have both reported some success running on gcj. Azureus and RSSOwl are real success stories that complement the current Fedora Core/Extras offerings. My recent experience with the jogl and lwjgl communities tells me that project maintainers are willing to put work into getting their projects working with Free runtimes. We need to engage the Azureus and RSSOwl developer communities to see if they are willing to help make this all possible. I also wonder what the base compiler for FC5 will be. My guess at the FC and GCC schedules make me think that we could be using GCC 4.1, which would be nice. But 4.0.x is also possible. We should suss this out ASAP as it impacts how we go about getting these apps running. Well, this is all just my personal opinion - but I think it’s all possible. I hope I can convince everybody else! AG -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
