Re: creating standalone gij/gcj builds

[Jens Lehmann <jens dot lehmann at goldmail dot de>]

Arnaud Vandyck wrote:
> Jens Lehmann <jens.lehmann@goldmail.de> writes:
>
> Hi Jens,
>
> You are using Debian, aren't you? 

Yes, I am. :-)

> > > I recently used gcj and gij for the first time and am very interested
> > > in this project. However I find it very difficult to use it in eclipse
> > > (and probably any other IDE) as a Standard-VM. It's required to
> > > compile gcc and make various changes to get it working. I'm still
> > > having problems, but this is not the topic of this thread.
>
>
> You can install gcj from the Debian package:
>
> $ dpkg -l gcj gij
>
> ii  gcj            3.3.2-2        The GNU Java compiler
> ii  gij            3.3.2-2        The GNU Java bytecode interpreter

Installing gij/gcj using Debian packages is not a problem. I can compile 
and run fine on the commandline. Integration in eclipse is more complicated.

> > > Of course everything would be significantly easier, if gij/gcj would
> > > provide a similar installation, like the J2SDK does. This means a
> > > packed file for different platforms you can simply extract somewhere
> > > and you are ready to run. By using the same/similar directory
> > > structure and file names, you could use gcj/gij very easy in existing
> > > IDEs.
>
>
> 1° Maybe it's more a distro thing;

Maybe, but it should be made easy for the distros. Having standalone 
builds also enables developers to run multiple versions of gij/gcj 
without problems (I already have several VMs installed), so they can 
test upcoming beta releases easier.

> 2° About Debian, you can maybe join the debian-java mailing list and ask
>    for this ('gcj, gij have a J2SDK like tree structure'), I think some
>    people will be interresting. We probably post something related to
>    this in less than a month ;-)

I'm already reading the list (a lot of spam btw.). I'll probably send 
you a private mail to get some of my thoughts regarding free Java and 
Debian sorted.

> 3° Also, gcj does provide a lot of tools but not all (gjdoc is not a
>    part of gcj AFAIK).

You're right. It belongs to classpath. That's a problem indeed.

Jens