Re: RFH: how to really assemble java packages

[Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org>]

Daniel Bonniot <Daniel.Bonniot <at> inria.fr> writes:

> Is there any chance to have a non-Sun implementation of com.sun.*?

Pretty much zero. For two reasons:

a) legal. Since it's unspecified & undocumented, it'd be very hard to 
write without going to the source. As SCSL is evil, I don't think anyone
would want that.

b) practical. As it's undocumented and unspecified, Sun is free to change it
any time. They do shuffle their sun.* classes around a bit with each release,
afaik, so code that uses them works by pure accident anyway. That limits the
usefulness of a sun.* implementation, as you'd be stuck supporting all sorts
of incompatible variants of an unsupported API. Doesn't sound like a good 
plan to me. :)

In my experience, it's more productive to submit a bug report to upstream to
write to documented APIs instead, and propose a few alternatives[1]. That way,
everyone ends up being better off in the long run: the code eventually works
in a predictable fashion, so upstream is happy, and it works on free runtimes,
so debian users are happy.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] Or even volunteer to do it, if the code really matters to you. :)