Re: Let Jikes (finally) go into testing on its own...

[Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.net>]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 12:44:34AM -0500, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:
> These JVMs are encouraged and free to move these one-file wrappers to
> their own packages (which in turn will probably Depend: on jikes or
> make it Recommend: and make wrappers fail gracefully or sth. like that).
> 
> I seek for seconds for this proposal, especially from the jikes
> maintainer (who should be the one most interested in having jikes in
> testing anyway). If people are busy - I can do the NMU.

Irrespective of the testing issue, it seems obvious that just as the
jikes source package is the wrong place for these wrappers (why
should the compiler know about different runtimes?), so are the JVM
source packages (why should the runtime know about a compiler?).  It
would make much more sense for the JVM packages to register their
standard libraries as alternatives (the alternative could either be
the library, or perhaps more generally, a file containing a list of
library files).  Then jikes as well as any other compiler that is
not bundled with its own standard libraries could find them in the
same way.  After all, it is silly to implement a solution that works
only for jikes.

Of course, users will lose the ability to type "jikes-kaffe" when
they specifically know they want the kaffe libs, but this is rarely
needed, and when it is, one can still specify "-bootclasspath".

Since people are talking about modifying the JVM packages anyway,
would not this solution be just as easy?  jikes would have to be
modified as well, of course.

Andrew