Buildable only?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Norman,

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 21:17 +0200, Norman Hendrich wrote:
> <no-offence-meant-again>
> 
> Sorry for having shortened the thread title somewhat:  The phrase
> 'buildable only' seems to summarize my personal year-long experiments 
> with free-Java pretty well. I am well aware of the hard work of
> the gcc/gcj, kaffe, and classpath developers, but I have to admit
> that despite of all the hard work, I cannot even run the simplest
> of my own applications. (However, I do can *compile* them now).
> 
> </no-offence-meant-again>

That is progress I guess.
I have had much better experience with all the runtime/compiler
combinations. But then I explicitly wrote my programs for them and I
don't actually use our awt or swing implementation that much.

> Mark> Where/How do these actual users communicate about the problems they are
> Mark> experiencing and the disconnect between us developers and them? I would
> Mark> like to better understand the actual problems these users see that we
> Mark> developers might be missing.
> 
> OK, here is one users opinion: I don't really care about Jonas&Co,
> and I am happy to run Eclipse under JDK 1.4.2 and J2SE 5.0, but
> I *do* care about AWT/Swing, because I *do* like user interfaces
> even for my small utils.

You could look at java-gnome (http://java-gnome.sf.net/) that is what I
would recommend using atm.

> (Also, I *would* like to help with AWT, but unfortunately I did once look 
> at the source code of java.awt.Panel during the 1.0.2 era, which means
> that I am 'tainted' now.)

Of course if you just accidentally saw some of the source code and had
no intention to study the implementation with the intention of
contributing to libgcj to provide a replacement there is no problem with
you contributing. But we do indeed want to be really clear on the fact
that we created an independent implementation. And we don't want to get
into tricky legal situations. So please check the actual requirements
for contributing:

http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/ClasspathFirstSteps
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/docs/hacking.html#SEC2

Please contact me if you have any questions after reading that.

> During the last days, I *did* download the latest snapshots of gcc/gcj
> and classpath-0.15, and I *have* all dependecies including cairo-0.3.0
> etc...  However, even with the latest fixes in, showing a simple frame
> has broken insets in GTK, and drawing Images is now broken in both the
> pure-AWT-Graphics and the fancy-cairo-shouldbe-Graphics2D stuff. Popup-
> menus appear at random positions in random sizes. Using a JTree compiles, 
> but most of the functions are dead.

Thanks for filing all those bug reports!
If there is anything else missing please, please, please add them.
The list of issues might be a bit depressing. But it does give us a
challenge to work on. Sadly, they won't get magically fixed since we are
all just volunteers.

Especially Free Swing is really improving these days.
But some of the low level AWT/gtk-peer stuff is a but fragile.
We do know what needs to be done. Especially with moving forward to
cairo 0.5.0 and 1.0 comming soon:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2005-05/msg00004.html
But again. It won't "magically" get better. There are however people
thinking and working on getting us better here also.

One thing that I hope will help is merging the GNU Classpath bug
database and the gcc/libgcj bugzilla. This should not be that far in the
future: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-02/msg00586.html
That should give some of the bugs more visibility and make more clear
who is working on what.

Sorry that I don't have bug fixes immediately for you I would love to.
But I don't believe there is a developer/user disconnect here. We know
that it is important to fix these bugs!

And part of the indirect-dispatch work and splitting the library work
into core and awt/swing parts is meant to make hacking on all this
easier.

Cheers,

Mark

-- 
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http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

Join the community at http://planet.classpath.org/
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