Re: libjava "make install" is broken again

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at waitaki dot otago dot ac dot nz>]

Jeff Sturm wrote:

>One workaround is to forget about libgcjgc.so and libzgcj.so and link them
>as convenience libraries instead.  I'm not sure why we have these; at one
>time it may have seemed feasible to have pluggable GC but it certainly
>isn't now.
>

I agree. The only argument against doing that is that is that it would 
be nice to have boehm-gc installed as a separate .so that can be used by 
random non-Java programs. I know Hans has been working towards that by 
making most of the compile-time flags that used to enable specific GCJ 
support into runtime options. It isn't much good as long as its called 
"libgcjgc", though. And having it as a separate library does keep the 
possiblity of version skew, since libgcj and the gc are rather tightly 
dependent on each other.

It is certainly wrong for gcj to dynamically link binaries directly 
against libgcjgc - which is what is done currently.

>I've wanted to patch the build for a while to remove libgcjgc.so and
>libzgcj.so, but didn't get around to it because it doesn't really fix
>anything that's "broken".  Except that it may prevent the relink.
>

libzgcj.so is silly. Linux systems at least seem to have a libz.so 
anyway, so we should just use that if it is available. Or we could just 
switch to the pure-Java java.util.zip implementation that classpath has.

regards

Bryce.