[kaffe] possible gpl violation in kjc.jar

[Dalibor Topic]

Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Dalibor Topic wrote:
> 
>> a) removing kjc.jar from CVS in order to stop its distribution as it is
>> b1) ask copyright holders (DMS) of Kjc for explicit permission to 
>> redistribute kjc again
>> b2) merge in kjc cvs module with our patches into kaffe's cvs module
> 
> 
> I've done a and b1, I'll hack on the build system changes now.

I've received[1] word back from Thomas Graf from DMS, and got permission 
to quote his mail.

"I might not have understood your question, but, as far as I understand,
you don't need my permission to include the source code of KJC in Kaffe
- this is covered by the GPL. However, if you prefer, I hereby give you
the permission explicitely."

So b1 is now done, we've got a permission to include kjc into kaffe.

There are more good news:

"We will put some manpower in the next weeks to make "official" KJC work
again with Kaffe. This will eliminate the need to keep a separate copy
of the source code and to resync the source trees. On the other hand,
someone must then include KJC as a package on its own into Debian."

So we may not need to explicitely include kjc into Kaffe, as it would 
work out of the box with it. I'll temporarily switch the javac script in 
the scripts directory to wrap around the jikes binary detected by 
configure for 1.1.5 [2]. After 1.1.5, we should consider adding kaffe 
support to Thomas Fitzsimmons gcj java wrapper, or splitting the 'tools' 
package off to wrap kjc 'from the source', jikes, ecj, gcjx, etc.

I've told Thomas about Arnaud's ongoing effort to package kjc into 
Debian. Thomas was also interested whether there was a description of 
the patches in kaffe's kjc module, which bugs they fixed and the tests 
cases, so I'm ccing Ito and Guilhem on that.

Thomas closed with
"Thank you for your work on Kaffe and free Java." so I'm relaying that 
message over to you, the great Kaffe hacker, tester, packager and user 
community.[3]

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] It seems that his mail to my kaffe.org address got lost, so it took 
a few more days than expected to get in touch with me via my yahoo address.

[2] It's coming up soon, it should be released before FOSDEM. Make 
distcheck is now fixed, the task list from my side looks like this:
* wrap jikes as javac for this release, wrap multiple compilers later
* Add -pthreads back to CFLAGS for freebsd
* Fix cross-compilation issues with configure
* Scale the warnings back to -Wall for release to aid packagers and 
porters in detecting the serious problems and fixing them (gb complained 
about that). The current excessive warning flood by setting almost every 
gcc warning flood gives a worse impression of Kaffe's quality of code 
atm and drowns out the significant warnings from the less significant 
ones. Let's fix the few remaining -Wall warnings first, and then attack 
the others. I've got ~ 20 to go on powerpc-linux-intrp with gcc 3.4. :)
* Merge in Arnaud's work on man pages in Debian
* Finish rmic fixes for lucene
* Find out what broke ant's bootstrap
* Merge in Classpath's fix for the broken LocaleInformation files when 
it arrives
* think hard about merging in gcjwebplugin
* possibly merge in java,util.zip from gcj, and some smaller pieces from 
GNU Classpath (Double, Float, Math).

[3] See you at FOSDEM's Classpath track 
http://www.fosdem.org/2005/index/dev_room_classpath