[kaffe] The trouble with Klasses.jar

[Jukka Santala]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> A regular source of bug reports seems to be the state
> of Klasses.jar: it is usually a few patches behind the
> source code. You are probably wondering why
> Klasses.jar is not updated more regularly.

Well, I'll second this motion to make Klasses.jar built by default. I was
goign to suggest that myself, in fact, but you got there before. As it's
really quick build anyway, it doesn't matter all that much.

The thought of having different versions of Klasses.jar as well is
interesting, but we have to remember that due to JNI and other
dependencies, the Klasses.jars ar eusually very VM-build specific, and for
the most advantages the native code included with Kaffe also often needs
to be modified or selectively included.

Despite this, just getting Klasses.jar automatically up to date with the
build is enough reason to implement this. Stripping Klasses.jar down to
minimum needed for new compile may be easier said than done, though; but
it's sufficient to just include a default build of the whole classlib
that's recent enough to work. Maybe there's reason to archive this
separately in case the primary Klasses.jar gets messed up due to adverse
change, but I'd recommend against making them separately downloadable, as
matching VM (JNI functions) and Klasses.jar versions would be a pain and
probably even larger source of (frivolious) bug reports.

 -Jukka Santala