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

[Andrew Haley]

Thomas Fitzsimmons writes:
 > 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.

OK, that's fair, but it's going to be *really* easy to let things in
Classpath slide.  I am going to keep on top of this: apart from ppc
issues, there are also the secondary architectures ARM, IA-64, and
SPARC.  I'd like to keep gcj going in good shape until we have a
reasonable portability story for OpenJDK.

Andrew.

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