starting off

[Greg Lewis]

G'day Rick,

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 09:43:51PM -0600, Rick C. Petty wrote:
> First of all, please use a more appropriate subject.  Most of us subscribe
> to multiple mailing lists, so a subject like "starting off" makes no sense
> for the questions you are asking.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 11:34:55AM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
> > 
> > OK.  I need here to say that I'm more than a little bit astonished at how easily
> > the jdk16 port built.  I haven't even tried to use the port for several years,
> 
> That's obvious, since jdk ports have been building just fine for _many_
> years.  In fact port maintainers and our ports team have done a very good
> job keeping ports working well.  I hope those people and others who maintain
> the java ports don't take offense to your astonishment.

I can't speak for all involved.  But I certainly didn't take any offense
to Chuck's comments.

> > and the last times I remember trying it, the port really needed great amounts of
> > hand-holding to get it to work.  You might need to advertise the fact that it
> > now just plain builds, perfectly, as if it had no bad history at all.
> 
> That is completely unnecessary.  Your comment sounds like an insult wrapped
> inside a complement.  There are many people keeping FreeBSD ports up to
> date and they are doing an excellent job.  Even back to jdk12, I hardly
> recall having to do anything special...  things just worked.  This is what
> I expect from FreeBSD and why I don't use other distros.  FreeBSD ports
> often seem to work better than the ports themselves do.

Again, this isn't how I certainly read it at all.  If anyone should be
offended I'd guess it would be me since I've been involved in all the ports
since 1.2 :).

The JDK _did_ used to be a lot harder to build.  Or rather, I hope all the
work over the years has made it easier, and thats what I think Chuck was
saying.  These incremental improvements probably don't show so much if
you've been tracking things closely all that time, but Chuck has been out
of the loop for a few years and it probably does seem like "Wow, things
have gotten so much better!".  At least I hope so.

That said, the JDK is still a complex piece of software and there are still
people who have difficulty getting it to work on FreeBSD.  There's plenty
of work yet to do.  In no particular order:

1. Bootstrapping is still too hard.  I think OpenJDK can help here, but it
   still needs someone to initially build it.
2. I need to put out a new patchset for jdk15.  I thought I was close but
   I think Sun are close to releasing a new update, and I hate to push
   what may be the last patchset just before they do that *sigh*.
3. We're missing some of the functionality that Linux and Solaris have in
   Java 6.
4. While there is a port of OpenJDK 7, there is nothing for OpenJDK 6 yet.
5. Landon Fuller did an initial port to sparc64 earlier this year.  It needs
   someone to clean it up and do some more testing.
6. jdk14 will soon be at the point where it should either be deleted or
   made to work on FreeBSD 7 (if anyone is still interested in it).
7. eclipse-devel should become eclipse and all the Eclipse plugin ports
   should either be updated as necessary or we should seriously think about
   just using Eclipse's own plugin managerment system and delete all the
   Eclipse ports that don't need FreeBSD specific patches to make them work.
   Getting our changes back into Eclipse would also be a _big_ help.

... and I'm sure there are lots more (I didn't even mention an ia64 port,
which I think would be cool :).

> > I wasn't aware of the eclipse-devel port, it's perfect for me, thanks.  The only
> > stumbling block I found was in trying to find the name of the ant port
> > (apache-ant didn't seem at all obvious to me).  You folks think that there's
> > some problem with using ant, or Ant, anything more obvious?
> 
> The name of the project is "Apache Ant".  The distfiles are apache-ant.
> The unpacked tarball goes into apache-ant.  The port maintainer correctly
> labelled the port.

Maybe so, but I don't think its very intuitive.  Every Java developer I
know refers to it simply as "ant", so I think calling the port apache-ant
makes it harder to find.  Especially since its in devel (where it should
be) rather than in java where all the JDK ports and other things that
shouldn't be there are.

I actually think the naming convention may be a hangover from it originally
being jakarta-ant, but I could be mistaken.

> To the FreeBSD Java team:  Thank you for your efforts!  Your work has
> allowed me to use FreeBSD at work and as such, I am more efficient.

Thanks Rick.  But please, there was no need to come down on Chuck quite
like this.  Many may not recall, but Chuck is a ports committer emeritus
and I'm actually glad to see him back (anytime you want the gnuplot port
back, just let me know :).

Anyway, I'd hate to see this get blown out of proportion, so lets all try
to relax a little and focus on what we can do to make Java on FreeBSD even
better.

-- 
Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org