Re: Importing sources (?)

[Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp dot org>]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 12:11:01AM -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
> Today I started trying to build a tree that includes both libgcj
> and other free software Java pieces.  My particular tree includes
> parts of Cryptix and javax.servlet. However, there are other bits
> out there:
> SAX/XML stuff, audio stuff, and CORBA (at least).
> 
> Assuming licensing problems can be worked out, and assuming that
> we can get the blessing of the package developers, do you think
> it would be worthwhile to import packages like this into libgcj?

Yes I think this is a great idea.
I take full blame for the fact that the servlet classes that
Paul Siegmann and I wrote  are not yet in Classpath.
The problem was that we wanted to provide different versions
of the library since different projects needed different
implementations. Paul has written a Perl script to generate the
different versions from one master source file. I didn't know
how to do this with the auto* tools that libgcj/classpath uses.
The copyright has already been assigned to the FSF.

> On the downside is increased maintenance burden.
> If we find a bug we have to know where to report it.
> We'll have to deal with multiple conflicting coding styles.

When it has been imported into Classpath I (and I assume Paul)
can take care of maintenance. The servlet library is very
stable and I believe that the last few bug fix was a few months
ago. (Although I haven't looked at the new servlet spec so it
might need some updating for the new spec.)

But for other libraries we have to ask the developers if they
want to assign the copyright to the FSF before including it
and if they don't we should make sure that we always include
the latest snapshot for every new release.

Cheers,

Mark