Re: RFA: enable gappletviewer, gjarsigner and gkeytool tools

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > 
 > I think it would be better to write a CNI toolwrapper and link it 
 > directly against a compiled libgcj-tools.so. This would have several 
 > advantages:
 > 
 > a) There's no need to dlopen anything, thus the wrapper code becomes 
 > much simpler and there is no "relocatable tree" problem.
 > b) The tools will work out-of-the-box on platforms that may not support 
 > JNI / JNI invocation for whatever reason (win32?)
 > c) Native compiled code will be used automatically, no need for 
 > gcj-dbtool or dlopen to load libgcj-tools.so.
 > 
 > (In fact, if it were not for the need to support the -J option, we 
 > wouldn't need any wrapper code at all, just a "gcj --main=... -o 
 > gwhatever -lgcj-tools")
 > 
 > There is certainly an argument that it would be nice to share the 
 > wrapper code with classpath, but in this case I'm not sure the extra 
 > complexity is worth it.

+1.  I agree totally; we should utilize CNI wherever it helps us.

Andrew.