[kaffe] Kaffe 1.1.7 - compilation failure

[Krzysztof Strasburger]

Dear users and developers of kaffe!
I have to admit first, that i always avoided java as much as possible.
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible, as i have to run the program
"jalview", which is written, ehmmm, in java, and has no other free
equivalent. This program does... eh, it does something.
I was able to compile jikes and kaffe 1.1.6 and even build apache ant,
and then build jalview. But jalview does not work with kaffe 1.1.6, ending
with the following message:
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: javax/swing/JComponent.setDropTarget(Ljava/awt/dnd/DropTarget;)V
   at jalview.bin.Jalview.main (source file unknown)
   at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke0 (Method.java)
...
I was looking at the source code and this seems to be an internal problem of kaffe.
Of course, the "latest and greatest" thing should be tried out, but compilation
of kaffe 1.1.7 fails. Make exits with:

if test "" != ""; then  -r -D glibj.zip gnu java javax org META-INF > /dev/null; fi
if test "/home/strasbur/java/kaffe-1.1.7/external/gcc/fastjar/fastjar" != ""; then /home/strasbur/java/kaffe-1.1.7/external/gcc/fastjar/fastjar cf glibj.zip gnu java javax org META-INF; fi
javax: No such file or directory
Error adding javax to jar archive!
make[3]: *** [glibj.zip] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/strasbur/java/kaffe-1.1.7/libraries/javalib/external/classpath/lib' 

Following "configure" options have been used:
--with-x --prefix=/usr/local/kaffe --disable-nls --disable-static
--with-system-zlib --disable-jni --disable-gtk-peer --with-kaffe-x-awt

Additional information about the compilation environment: linux 2.4.31,
glibc 2.1.3, gcc 3.3.6, make 3.79.1, jikes 1.22.

I was reading the mailing list archives and it seems that nobody experienced
a similar failure. What could be the reason?

Krzysztof Strasburger