[kaffe] LinuxTag and RMLL impressions

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi all,

by now you might know that I've had a meeting with Mark Wielaard from GNU
Classpath to discuss further integration of Classpath's class library into
kaffe. I've also met with other Classpath hackers to discuss the advancement of
GNU Classpath. It was all very exciting, and I wish that the next such meeting
in October in Saarbruecken will attract more developers from kaffe.

A few ideas came out of those meetings, that were summarized by Mark here 

http://www.kaffe.org/pipermail/kaffe/2003-July/043094.html 
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2003-07/msg00040.html

I'll give you a summary of other things I found interesting over the last
couple of days.

* Old kaffe versions in BSDs

On the RMLL, all the BSD projects were present. I've got an introduction into
the BSD ports system, and can now figure out who the maintainer of an out of
date package is ;)

OpenBSD : 1.0.6 : Ian Darwin <ian at openbsd.org> , has patches by pvalchev
FreeBSD : 1.0.7 : xaa+ports at timewasters.nl, no patches
NetBSD  : 1.0.7nb1: tch-pkg at netbsd.org, 3 somewhat strange patches

If you are using one those operating systems, please get in touch with the
respective maintainer to provide an updated version of kaffe for his system.

* Kaffe 1.1.0 and debian

Marko Jung from Saarbruecken offered to help with kaffe maintenance in debian
to ease the load on Ean. Since 1.1.0 was broken on a few linux platforms, I'll
get in touch with him when 1.1.1 is out.

The stable version on debian is 1.0.5, which should somehow be resolved. 1.0.5
is *years* behind 1.1.0. I'm not familiar enough with Debian to say what needs
to be done or fixed. The current situation casts a bad light on kaffe in
debian, though. In fact, there seems to be a call to purge kaffe from the
debian distribution. It is marked [REMOVE] on the release critical bug reports.

* Kaffe and Worldforge

The worldforge developers have a client in java that utilizes OpenGL. They
would be interested in running it on kaffe, which means they could help getting
open GL bindings for Java to work on kaffe.

Beside the 'cool!' effect, having the OpenGL binding working in kaffe would
result in an interesting testbed for a openGL based implementation of
Graphics2D by GNU Classpath developers.

* Kaffe and OpenOffice

I've got hold of the e-mail address of the OpenOffice build system developer,
who might be able to figure out what remains to be done for kaffe to be useable
for an open office build. Apparently all they need is a java compiler, and we
already ship kjc.

Building OpenOffice might be a good reason to revive ports of kaffe like
BeKaffe and merge them back into the kaffe.org tree. Talking to OpenOffice
representatives at LinuxTag showed that there was a lot of interest on those
platforms without a vendor provided somewhat current java implementation to use
something else to build OpenOffice.

* Kaffe and Konqueror

Once Rob's verifier is finished, we could seriously start working together with
free software browsers to provide support for applets in konqueror or mozilla.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to get hold of a konqueror developer on LinuxTag,
but I'll try to get through to someone.

* NIO, NIO, NIO

freenet needs nio. sascha brawer needs nio for his font rendering work.
everyone seems to need nio these days, and noone has the native bits working
yet. I hope that Michael Koch from libgcj is on a good way with his
implementation. I'm in touch with Matthew from freenet to see what they exactly
need.

* OpenEJB

I've played a bit with openEJB and got it to load a bit further by making
AppClassLoader extend URLClassLoader, until it starts playing reflection games
with Sun-specific fields of ClassLoader. Someone could try to persuade the
OpenEJB developers not to do such embarassing things in public. ;)

so much for the big stuff I can remember off the top of my head.

cheers,
dalibor topic

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