If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I was really enthusiastic for Sun opening the JDK so that we could have Free Java. This should have solved both the Java trap and the Java crap (the false sense of portability among systems), and I was really looking forward for it.
When Sun finally made OpenJDK sources available, the Gentoo Java team was already on the field, and we were the first distribution packaging it, albeit in an experimental overlay that most users wouldn’t want to try. I also tried to do my best to improve the situation submitting buildsystem fixes to Sun itself to get it to build on my term, which means system libraries, --as-needed support and so on. The hospital set me back so I couldn’t continue my work to have something working, so at the end I gave up. Too bad.
After I came home I discovered that the IcedTea idea seemed to work fine, and the project was really getting something done, cool! But it wasn’t ready for prime time yet, so I decided to wait; I tried getting back on track last summer, but hospital set me back again, so I decided to not stick around too much, being out of the loop.
But since I stopped using Konqueror (with the rest of KDE) and moved to Firefox I’m missing Java functionality, since I’m on AMD64 and I don’t intend to use the 32-bit Firefox builds. So I decided to check out IcedTea6, based on OpenJDK 6 (that is, the codebase of the 1.6 series of Sun JDK, which should be much more stable). IcedTea6 actually got releases out, 1.2, 1.3, 1.3.1 now. Even though Andrew seems to be optimistic, this is not working just yet.
First problem: while OpenJDK only bootstrapped with Sun JDK 1.7 betas, IcedTea6 only bootstraps with IcedTea itself or another GNU classpath based compiler, like gcj or cacao. Okay so I merged gcj-jdk and used that one; IcedTea6 fails when I force --as-needed through compiler specs. Since the build system is quite too much of a mess for me I didn’t want to try fixing that just yet, I just wanted it to work, so I disabled that and restarted build. With gcj-jdk it fails to build because of a problem with source/target settings. Okay I can still use cacao.
The first problem with cacao is that gnu-classpath does not build with the nsplugin USE flag enabled since it does not recognise xulrunner-1.9, there is a bug open for that but no solution just yet. I disable that one and cacao builds, although IcedTea6 fails later on with internal compiler error. Yuppie!
And this is not just the end of the Odissey; I want to get Freemind to work on Yamato since I’ve tried it out and it really seems cool, but I can get it to work only on OS X for now, since to build some of its dependencies on Gentoo I need a 1.4 JDK, but on AMD64 there is no Sun JDK 1.4, no Blackdown, just Kaffe… and Kaffe 1.1.7 (the latest is 1.1.9), which is not considered anything useful or usable (and indeed it fails to build the dependency here).
I think the road is still very long, and very tricky. And I need to get a Java minion to help me finding what the heck of the problem it is!