kotlin2 in Debian -- 2025W14 update

[Julien Plissonneau Duquène <sre4ever@free.fr>]

Good evening,

Not much was achieved on kotlin2 this week after I got distracted by too 
many things.

Le 2025-03-28 19:55, Julien Plissonneau Duquène a écrit :
> start combing through the dependencies

I'm almost there. So far I've ditched 62 of the 69 patches that were 
applied to Kotlin 1.3.31, keeping the remaining 7 aside for now. Most of 
the removed patches were to convert the gradle build scripts from Kotlin 
DSL to Groovy DSL, an approach that was useful for the initial packaging 
of Kotlin but that proved to be a dead end in terms of maintainability.

My current plan is to use Gradle 8.11 for the build, first using the 
binary distribution until I get Kotlin to build successfully in offline 
mode with only Debian dependencies, and then switch to my own build of 
Gradle. Later in order to make the package "bootstrappable" I'm planning 
to reuse (and finish) the Makefile generator I've started to write for 
Gradle, and then I will try to compile it with older releases of the 
compiler to see if the "treasure trail" strategy can be completed to 
find a bootstrapping path.

And speaking of old things — last call for a sponsor for a Kotlin 1.3.31 
update before I file a formal RFS ;)

Next week-end I'm going to participate to the BSP in Wien, hoping to 
meet some of you there, and decrease significantly the count of RC bugs 
on Java packages (30 currently) and a few others.

Cheers,

--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène