Status Update

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi all,

Time to give a little status update. The past month there has been lots
of work on merging more of Classpath and libgcj. According to Tom Tromey
we are now 100 classes closer to a full merge! And according to the status
page we have about 90 classes to go. See:
<http://gcc.gnu.org/java/libgcj-classpath-compare.html>

I hoped to contribute a bit more to this effort so we would have most
of it done by the end of the year. But I don't think we can really finish
it in only two months because a large part of the merge work up till now
consisted of simple Exception and Interface merges. The remaining classes
have lots of native code and lots of underlying gnu.* classes that are not
shown in the comparison page. And I think there are a couple of more
important things to do for the project at this point then finishing the
merge.

A few recent events made me realize that we should really work more on
our packaging, build process, documentation and VM interface. A friend
of mine wanted to help hack on the Classpath source but had a very hard
time getting a recent VM/Classpath setup that worked (to be honest he
still doesn't have a working setup, but is determined to get one).
Debian (sid/unstable) currently comes with three (!) different versions
of Classpath, one for gcj, one for Kissme and one for Orp.
And a discussion with David Brownell and Nic Ferrier of the ClasspathX
project (on the GCJ address@hidden mailing list, yeah for integration!)
made me realize that we don't have an easy way in share standard libraries
with the other GNU projects (or even non-GNU projects).

I know some people on the list have said this before, but until now I
didn't realize what all the fuss was about. You may call me slow...

So the coming month I will spend some time on getting our documentation
more up to date. Try to get both the Kissme and Orp VM (maybe others?) to
work with the current Classpath from CVS. It seems that this will be easier
then finishing the libgcj port at this moment. And it will give me a better
insight in our VM interface. I will also work on my 1.4 Throwable support
since I think this will make our VM interface simpler.

If there is time (or just because it is fun) I will look if I can help with
the build infrastructure. It works for me, but lots of people on the list
say it is complex. I also like the makeJazzlibDist and mkcollections scripts
because they give us ways to release parts of Classpath. Maybe they can be
genralized to other packages?

Brian when do you expect to make a new Classpath release? And what do you
think should be in it?

Cheers,

Mark
-- 
Stuff to read:
    <http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html>
  What's Wrong with Copy Protection, by John Gilmore