Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:43:26 -0700 From: Greg Lewis <glewis@eyesbeyond.com> To: Panagiotis Astithas <past@ebs.gr> Cc: freebsd-java@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Java 1.5 donations Message-ID: <20060323174325.GA39967@misty.eyesbeyond.com> In-Reply-To: <4422840E.8000704@ebs.gr> References: <441A35AE.2020108@roq.com> <20060321225113.GA53948@misty.eyesbeyond.com> <4422840E.8000704@ebs.gr>
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Hi Panagiotis, On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 01:18:38PM +0200, Panagiotis Astithas wrote: > Greg Lewis wrote: > >Hi Michael, > > > >On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 03:06:06PM +1100, Michael Vince wrote: > >>I was wondering if anyone knew if there was any details such as a time > >>frame and a rough figure of how much it would cost to get some good > >>results (or even full Sun Java certification) happening 1.5 Java on > >>i386/amd64 as I was hoping maybe I could persuade the company I work at > >>to donate. I also did notice that there was recently a funding > >>announcement for Java 1.5 on FreeBSD on the FreeBSD foundation web site > >>which is good news. > > > >I don't want to say too much about this just at the moment... > > I've been wondering why has there been such a silence on the > foundation-sponsored work. There hasn't been any status update to let us > know if we are still on schedule for a certified Java binary this month. > There hasn't even been a disclosure of the identity of the person who is > doing the TCK work. It would give more of a "community" feeling to the > whole process :-) I think thats a fair comment. I guess that for the certification work I don't feel its my position to be making any announcements on it in terms of progress, participation, etc. since its not my trumpet to blow. > In the past, we used to see regular status updates from you or Alexey, > and Nate Williams used to be even more prompt to discuss the state of > affairs, whether good or bad. Is this just a case of too much work / too > little time, or has something fundamentally changed in the way the BSD > Java team works? Has Sun demanded anything like that? Is it perhaps > related to a potential change of course to use Sun partner sources for > the certified binaries, rather than SCSL licensed ones? As is usual, in a vacuum all sorts of speculation abounds :). Since that vacuum is partly my fault, I'll try and clear it up. There is nothing sinister going on. The reason for the lack of updates, as far as I know, is simply a lot of busy people focusing on doing what they can. However, you make a good point about this taking away some of the community feeling that we've tried to engender with regards to BSD and Java. I've been thinking for some time about starting a BSD Java blog so I could keep people up to date with what I'm doing. Unfortunately I haven't got around to that :(. So, as a form of impromptu update, here is what I've been doing. I moved house/job/state in December (just before Christmas :) and have been in temporary housing since. Its taken a lot longer to find a house than I'd hoped. The move has really impacted the time I've had to work on things in a number of ways (most of my machines are in storage, those that aren't are in our bedroom rather than an office, which curtails the times I can hack on things; the ISP that was provided in the temporary housing has been very flaky, with long periods of down time, bounced email, etc.; I've swapped a 20 minute commute for a 2 hour commute; new job is keeping me busy). So, in short, I've had a lot less time for Java than I've had previously. That means there are still a lot of things that I'd hoped to do which hasn't happened (e.g. the plugin still won't compile against Firefox 1.5). Having said that, I've been helping as much as possible with the certification process. With the constraints on my time this has mostly meant giving advice and answering questions, I'm not the principal person doing the work. In addition, thanks to support from the FreeBSD Foundation, major contributions from Kurt Miller and Christos Zoulas, patches from the community, and some smaller changes from me, we have a patchset 3 for 1.5.0 almost ready to go which should be solid enough for production use (at your own risk, of course). FWIW, here is my current TODO list as well, in case people are interested. These are in some sort of order, although its no guarantee of what order they'll be worked on :-). 1. Make the 1.5.0 plugin compile and work with Firefox 1.5+. There have been patches floating around for a while to make it compile, but the resulting plugin doesn't actually work. Some people have also had some success compiling it against Mozilla and then using it with Firefox 1.5+, but that is obviously a PITA. 2. Make the plugin work on amd64. I had some changes that would make it compile (with Firefox 1.0), but it didn't work (the plugin code wasn't 64 bit clean, neither was the browser interface for it). I'm hoping that Firefox 1.5 helps in this, but we need to solve 1. first. 3. Port the Mustang (1.6) beta. I'd really love to be able to have a patchset soon after 1.6 releases. 4. Get jbootstrap able to bootstrap the 1.4 build. It currently can bootstrap 1.3, but thats of limited usefulness at the moment. If I can bootstrap 1.4, then I can use that to bootstrap 1.5 and we don't need the Linux JDK to bootstrap anymore. 5. Port to sparc64. I have some sparc64 hardware, but its in storage. 6. Port to ia64. I have some ia64 hardware, but again its in storage. Hopefully that helps to feel some of the void. -- Greg Lewis Email : glewis@eyesbeyond.com Eyes Beyond Web : http://www.eyesbeyond.com Information Technology FreeBSD : glewis@FreeBSD.org
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