Java 1.5 donations

[Panagiotis Astithas]

Greg Lewis wrote:
> 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.


Thanks Greg, much appreciated. This was pretty much what I suspected 
(including your lack of free time :-)).

Regards,

Panagiotis