Re: [PROPOSAL] New Virtual Packages and way to handle Classpath
In message: <[🔎] 20030902192122.GA31406@katzien.de>
Jan Schulz <jasc.usenet@gmx.de> writes:
>* Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>
>>I like some of the ideas in your proposal, but things like "Java Runtime
>>Environments, which are complient to the Java Spec of a specific Version,
>>have to provide the virtual package [...] and setup alternatives [...]" are
>>not achievable with the current state of free java.
>
>This interface is not for the free ones but only for the sun complient
>ones (Sun, BD, IBM).
This unfortunately seems like the only viable approach.
>The rest will be handled independently.
How, though? If an application is known to work with kaffe or sablevm
or Sun's java, how is that application to pick which to use on invocation?
Will each application have to have a wrapper script which picks an
appropriate VM? How will the user pick which VM they want to use, if
multiple are available?
>As someone else pointed out, with the defiend interface to build
>packages, something can be setup to start regression testing (someone
>needs to setup it though...).
Would it be useful to have a tool (as previously mentioned) which
looked at a collection of classes or a jar and determined all the
signatures of the external dependencies? And another tool to generate
the list of signatures of all methods/fields provided? Then a third
to match up the two lists and give a reasonable first approximation
of if a given application has any hope of running under a given VM?
If such is useful, then I can fairly trivially generate those three
tools (in perl, so we don't have the chicken-and-egg problem). In
fact, I think I've previously posted something very close to this
in the last two years, in the prior go-round of the 'how do we handle
classpath' debate.
- Alex
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