Bug#212863: finjava: a tentative summary

[Daniel Bonniot <Daniel.Bonniot@inria.fr>]

Hi all,

There seems to be some misunderstanding going on. Having not taken 
sides, I thought I would try to help clarify the positions.

1) Necessity for findjava

I think Jan explained this well in his last message. Package A might 
work with kaffe or gij but not sablevm, while package B works with gij 
or sablevm but not kaffe. Alternatives cannot handle this situation. 
Findjava is the tool that allow the startup scripts of A and B to 
declare this fact, while being abstract over binary locations. 
Furthermore, one can invent more abstract tags to pass to finjava, like 
'awt', 'server' or whatever.

2) Independence of the JVM packages

That's Ean's point. Each JVM has its own command line arguments, so code 
is needed to translate a standardized set of command line arguments to 
the JVM own format. We should not put this translation code in a common 
package, because then each maintainer will need to update it from time 
to time, and it will be a mess.
This is already done by the wrapper scripts. So findjava should not 
return the 'raw' binary, but the wrapper scripts (ie 
/usr/bin/gij-wrapper, not /usr/bin/gij).
One thing needed is to put such a (minimal) standard of command-line 
arguments in the Java policy, so JVM packagers not what to implement. 
I'm not sure if we got there yet. Ean wrote:

> For more, you cannot specifiy it
> *enough* to satisfy every situation (like: enable the jitter with
> what option? Enable what GC with what option? What subset would you
> implement?) and IMO SUN should do this and not we.
It's true that we cannot handle every option. But we can handle them 
progressively as the need appears. Whether or not Sun should do it, 
nothing prevents us from making our own standard if needed (ie if "Sun 
compatible" is not enough). Remember, we are not dictating the world a 
format, just making some decision internal to Debian about the API 
between JVM callers and JVMs. For Sun JVM, the mpkg-j2sdk could install 
our own wrapper if necessary.


I hope I represented well the opinions (obviously, complain if not) and 
that will help understanding the situation.

Cheers,

Daniel