[kaffe] current status?

[Jim Pick]

On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 10:37, Andrew Mermell wrote:
> Hello,
> Could someone please give me a brief idea of what's happening with kaffe at
> this point?  Is it in much use on the PowerPC?

I recently upgraded my iBook and tried in on Mac OS X 10.2 / PowerPC. 
The head of CVS compiled staticly (dynamic linking hasn't been fixed for
Mac OS X).  It did complain about needing automake in the libltdl
directoy - I'm going to try to fix that today.  It was able to run
"Hello World", but was unable to run kjc (our javac, needed to recompile
the class libs).  I imagine that Linux/PPC would have similar results.

> I see that kaffe was included in Redhat 6 but is no longer being distributed
> by them as of RH7.3.  From your perspective, why did they do that and what are
> the implications for a redhat user?

I'm not surprised that they dropped it.  Even though Kaffe has been
around since 1997, the project was quite fragmented, and the Java
compatibility was quite lacking.  So it has been quite frustrating to
use previous versions of it.  I think the 1.1.0 release will be quite a
bit nicer, even though it's just doing to be a "development" release, as
the whole project seems to be gaining some momentum which it didn't have
in the past -- thanks to the hard work of the volunteer developers and
the free Java community.

Cheers,

 - Jim