Re: RFA: enable gappletviewer, gjarsigner and gkeytool tools

[Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim at redhat dot com>]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> 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.

Recently we've been trying to minimize divergence with GNU Classpath.  Toward 
that end, I'd like libgcj to share its tools strategy with other GNU 
Classpath-using VMs.

Tom