IcedTea - a first step towards OpenJDK

[Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com>]

IcedTea is a temporary fork of OpenJDK which allows building with a free
toolchain and adding/replacing code which is not yet available under a free
license. First deb Packages for amd64 and i386 are available at

  deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ gutsy/
  deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~doko/ubuntu/ gutsy/

Although the packages are built on gutsy, they are installable on sid as well.
These packages target developers only. Feedback about the following topics is
appreciated:

 - packaging and installation issues; the packaging is derived from the
   sun-javaX packages, so the packages do have the same "features" and
   bugs.

 - license issues; we currently cannot upload the packages, because some
   files still have non-free or no licenses. Unfortunately there doesn't
   exist yet a list of problematic files.

 - usability; do packages and applications build and run with the new
   jre and jdk (focus on main)?

Please contact Michael Koch or me if you do want to join the packaging and
maintainance effort. Thanks for any input.

  Matthias