Re: RFA: enable gappletviewer, gjarsigner and gkeytool tools

[Bryce McKinlay <mckinlay at redhat dot com>]

Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote:
> > Me too.  Using that as a reason to avoid CNI is (IMO) bonkers, though:
> > one of the few places we have a real advantage over "standard"
> > Java(tm) is CNI.  The fact that we can simply compile a bunch of
> > classes to an executable without any wrapper is a big plus.
>
> To support the -J option to the tools, we'd still need a wrapper, it'd 
> just be a CNI wrapper rather than a JNI wrapper.  The only real 
> simplification would be that it would allow us to avoid using libltdl.

This is a pretty significant simplification. But also, it means that 
libgcj-tools.so gets linked automatically, so we don't need gcj-dbtool 
to load the native code. That also makes things significantly simpler, 
especially if we want to use tools like jar during bootstrapping.

IMO, the gcj/CNI approach is so simple that the effort saved will far 
outweigh any perceived advantage from sharing the toolwrapper.

Besides, the proposed libgcj toolwrapper.c has a bunch of GCJ_LOCAL 
divergences anyway. These really do complicate merges, and should be 
avoided.

Bryce