[fedora-java] Fedora java packaging, icedtea vs gcj

[Sander Hoentjen]

On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 15:09 -0500, Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote:
> Andrew Haley wrote:
> > Thomas Fitzsimmons writes:
> >  > Sander Hoentjen wrote:
> >  > > Hi all,
> >  > > 
> >  > > 
> >  > > There is a program i would like to package (josm), only it doesn't
> >  > > compile with gcj, but it does with icedtea. Can this go into fedora?
> >  > 
> >  > During the Fedora 8 Features FESCo meeting, the issue of build
> >  > requiring IcedTea came up.  The informal policy decision was that
> >  > packages may build require IcedTea, but must still run on the base
> >  > Fedora architectures (i386, x86_64, ppc, ppc64) without requiring
> >  > external packages.  For Fedora 8, that meant packages had to run on
> >  > ppc/ppc64 libgcj.  For Fedora 9, IcedTea's ppc/ppc64 interpreter
> >  > should suffice.  So while ideally the package would build on both,
> >  > pragmatically I'd say go ahead and build require IcedTea.
> > 
> > I understand that, but it would surely be better in this case to get
> > the fix into libgcj.  It's not particularly difficult to do, and
> > surely we can be allowed the short time it would take to get the fix
> > in, and then the package would run everywhere.  Sure, it's tempting to
> > take the easy road, but in this case it's not hugely difficult to do
> > the right thing.
> 
> Yes, I'm working on a fix for GNU Classpath.  However, understand that it does 
> take a non-trivial amount of time to get a libgcj fix into Fedora, through the 
> GNU Classpath -> gcc HEAD -> Red Hat gcc branch -> Fedora Rawhide chain -- 
> several days at a minimum.  I'd rather not hold up Sander's progress waiting for 
> the fix to land.
> 
Thanks for your concern, but for me it is no problem. Tomorrow I will go
ahead and submit the package for review. It will probably take some time
before it is approved anyway. The question that remains is will this fix
ever go into F8, if not I would still have a problem.

I do like this solution better, so again I can be patient.

Sander