Buildable only?

[Norman Hendrich]

Hello Tom, hello Mark,

thanks for your replies. Just two more comments, and then I will begin
my weekend (it's already past eleven-thirty here):


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

Yes, I know. Much more stable than current gcj/AWT. 

But I guess the average developer will not even consider to change
his import-statements from 'swing' to 'swingwt'. Rewriting existing
apps or applets to java-gnome just isn't going to happen.

But running them with a different (and stable!) JVM is!



> 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.

I fear that showing and trying to explain code to students might not be
classified  as 'accidental' by your standard lawyers, despite the fact 
that libgcj was not around at the time :-)



Tom> Admittedly, our AWT/Swing implementation has been lower priority over
Tom> the past year.  

sorry to repeat myself, but make that "over the last six years"...


Tom> Instead, we've been focusing on satisfying the Java
Tom> requirements of major applications like Eclipse, OpenOffice.org and
Tom> Jonas.  The development effort you've seen has been focused on getting
Tom> these applications to work out-of-the-box on GCJ.  Components like
Tom> gcj-dbtool and gcjx were not written in the name of fanciness, they were
Tom> written to address real problems exposed by these large applications.


I guess most Java developers will try some of the example programs from
'Java in 21 days' or 'Java in a Nutshell' or 'Core Java' before they tackle
Jonas or building eclipse natively... Unfortunately, I have a feeling
that the gcj xfail rate on those tests would be much worse than recent 
Mauve testresults on i686-pc-linux-gnu :-(

If they even get to upgrade their GTK, freetype and cairo libs, they
run into a few crashes, see that image loading is broken, and that 
the nice animations don't work. The current state of 'Image' affairs
*is* a real show-stopper.

Do you really think the average student or developer will try gcj ever 
again, anytime soon?

---

BTW, perhaps we could convince D.Flanagan (and others) to contribute
the examples from best-selling Java books like Java-in-a-Nutshell
as testcases for Mauve&Co (as far as possible)?



Tom> We're now at a point where these large applications are fully supported
Tom> by GCJ.  Over the next year, I want to see our focus shift to filling
Tom> one of the big remaining holes in the free software desktop: a free Java
Tom> plugin.  This will mean completing our AWT/Swing implementation.

Good to hear that! I will wait and experiment some more, even if I would 
like it to be just six weeks :-)

- Norman