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

[Adam Majer <adamm@galacticasoftware.com>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 02:00:12PM -0500, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> 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



So, if someone wants to use jikes with kaffe, they will have to type

jikes -bootclasspath 'some kaffe paths' hello_world.java


The point of the java-wrappers is for people to install one of these
and then simply type:

javac hello_world.java


Or to have a java package in main compiled with javac and just having

Build-Depends: jikes-kaffe

or jikes-sablevm

or jikes-kaffe | jikes-sablevm


Otherwise you end up with FTBFS every time VM changes their paths.
This has already happened too many times.



- Adam