Hi all,
Over the past few days, a few of us (myself, dalibor, rkennke and mjw) have been discussing the possibility
of creating a project (BrandWeg) in a similar vein to IcedTea but working in the opposite direction
i.e. instead of patching
the binary plugs in OpenJDK with GNU Classpath code, we use OpenJDK code to fill some of the remaining
gaps in Classpath.
The primary motivations are:
* There are already a number of VM projects that rely on the GNU Classpath VM interface. This provides a way
of retaining this interface work while absorbing the benefits of the OpenJDK code release.
* There is currently greater traction for fixing issues in GNU Classpath than in OpenJDK. While IcedTea can highlight
issues with OpenJDK, it relies on Sun engineers to both accept these bugs (which after all come from a 'non-standard'
code base) and then fix them in later OpenJDK drops. Classpath bugs don't have such administration issues due to
its longer history as a FOSS project and existing community-oriented fun development paradigm.
I looked into this more last night and an initial attempt is now available via:
hg clone http://fuseyism.com/hg/brandweg
The resulting code doesn't yet build (this still needs work -- JAXWS is not as distinct as having its own Mercurial
repository implies) but it acts as an initial framework for looking at how we can build a hybrid of the two projects.
This project is still very experimental, and is being conducted outside the repositories of either GNU Classpath or
OpenJDK to retain the stability of these code bases and also avoid any unnecessary legal issues at this point
(specifically the use of GPLv2 only code in OpenJDK which, if committed to the GNU Classpath codebase, would
cause problems should Classpath want to move to GPLv3). The BrandWeg project does not host source code from
either project. It consists simply of build scripts and patches which allow a hybrid of the two to be built.
Comments and criticisms welcome.
--
Andrew :-)
Help end the Java Trap!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net
