[kaffe] Planning for 1.1.2 release - XAWT obsolete?

[Dalibor Topic]

Hallo Clemens,

Clemens Eisserer wrote:

>> Nope. GNU Classpath AWT integrating should happen for the 1.1.3.
>>
> Does this mean the current kaffe-xawt implementation will be thrown away?

I hope we'll have some way of interfacing to 'kaffe-style' AWTs from the 
past as well. We'll be able to see what can be done, when James and 
Stephane have finished their efforts to port kaffe's Qt-Awt and Xlib-Awt 
over to Classpath's peers. I hope we'll at least end up with some docs 
on migrating your peerless AWT to GNU/Kaffe [1].

The intention for kaffe's AWT is to transform it to work with 
Classpath's peers. It shouldn't be a problem to ship the 'old, but 
working' AWT alongside it, and provide a compile time selection switch 
--enable-old-awt that would compile the AWT libraries from different 
directories.

> This was the best awt implemenation I´ve every seen, and I dont 
> understand why gnu-classpath isnt based on this awt.

A) Incompabile licensing. Classpath is GPL + linking exception, kaffe is 
GPL, so Classpath can not include code from Kaffe.

B) Copyright assignment. The author of kaffe's AWT, Transvirtual, 
doesn't exist anymore, so there is noone who can transfer their 
copyright to the FSF anyway.


Anyway, if you want to help make the transition to Classpath easier, 
you're more than welcome to start looking at kaffe's and Classpath's 
classes and to point out where things can be taken over from Classpath 
already without breaking kaffe's AWT in any way. I've been doing this 
off and on when I carved enough time for it, but my time is 
unfortunately quite limited at the moment. So I'd very much appreciate 
any effort to enhance what we have in kaffe already by replacing more of 
the old code by code from Classpath where there are no negative effects.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] Bad joke, I know.