Re: Getting a Java package in the distribution?

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi,

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 13:20, Stefan Gybas wrote:
> D.Hansmann wrote:
>
> > build a java package from source (without changing it before)? There
> > probably won't be a speed improvement... ;)
> 
> Hey, that's what free/open source software is about! :-) Think for 
> example of security updates: They are very difficult if you don't build 
> the package from the source code. And you never know what's inside a JAR 
> if you don't build it yourself -- there might be non-free classes in 
> there accidentally.

Very good points. And at least for gcj (the GNU Compiler for java that
comes with GCC) when you have the java language source code then you can
create (optimized) native binaries which are really fast and startup
immediately (since they don't need to initialize a complete JVM).
I havee seen some amazing speedups from using gcj compiled binaries.
Especially for programs that you want to run as batch processors (for
example a XSLT transformer) that can really speed up things.

See for example the (RH RPMs, sorry about that) packages at:
http://sources.redhat.com/rhug/
(Now that I mentioned it, it would be nice if those could be turned into
Debian packages, they would all instantly go into main, since they are
build using gcj.)

Cheers,

Mark