Re: Current status of your swt-gtk package
The new packages run on kaffe? (it sounds that way, If you used a
different
free jvm them just 's/kaffe/[name of other JVM]/' for the following
questions.)
Afaik, yes. And on gcj/gij. And surely on the various other up-to-date
free
runtimes in Debian, since they all use pretty much the same class libs :)
A propperly working java bytecode-compiler should be able to generate
bytcode that runs on any (fully working)interpreter/native-compiler (JVM).
AFAICT the bytecode-compiler need not know or care which which
interpeter/native-compiler or classlib set will be used. Eclipse's own 'ecj'
should be able to bytcode-compile the java parts of eclipse just fine, and
If I were the maintainer I would do that. I think Kaffe is known to
bytecode-compile eclipse just fine.
I'm not so certain about bycode-compiling eclipse with gcj. When Redhat used
gcj to make a native version of eclipse it required some changes to gcj
itself. They did not even bother trying to use gjc for the bytcode-compiling
because they knew they would encounter bugs. The fact that they needed to
make changes to gcj to be able to native-compile eclipse makes it sound like
gcj may not be able to run eclipse. gij on te other hand would probably
work.
Also note that Kaffe includes some classes that are not a part of GNU
classpath, so it is possible a program may work fine on kaffe, but not on a
different free interpreter/native-compiler.
Did you remove the depends on an 'offical' JVM, or do 'kaffe|...'?
If you removed the depends on the 'offical' JVM rather than make it a
choice, please reconsider. Explanation: I have a JVM from sun installed
on
my system solely for reasons of practicallity. Since I already have that
installed, and that is known to run Eclipse just fine, I do not want to
waste space downloading kaffe.
It'd be impossible to move it main, afaik, if it only depended and worked
on non-free software.
true. However if it has a depends of [free software] *OR* [non-free
software], it is allowable.
If you want to avoid a $freevm download completely, you'd have to
make sure that the eclipse 3.1 package and all its dependencies build
and work fine on the non-free software in question, and don't
mess with the non-free software's licensing restrictions, for example.
It seems unlikely that any changes needed to support a free JVM will break
the running of
the program on the official JVM. Remember that the upstream version is
intended to be run
on the official JVM, so we know that that works.
I can see no reason why there would be licencing issues. I am aware of no
JVM that prohibits running of
java bytecode that can also be run on a JVM that is licenced differently.
If the fear is that compiling using kaffe might somehow contaminate the
resulting bytecode such that the
GPL applies to it is pure FUD. Even if it was true there is absolutely no
reason why compiling eclipse with
its own compiler would cause it to be a licence violation to run the
resulting bytecode on any JVM.
That's quite a chunk of work, and since the manpower of the
debian-java effort is limited, most people doing the actual packaging
work tend to concentrate their efforts on Free Software, which
Debian can distribute freely together.
cheers,
dalibor topic
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