After my post about the long road to Free Java I’ve tried to inquiry everybody who might have a clue about it and found what the root cause of the problem was.
Basically, when IcedTea6 is built, it has to bootstrap itself, so it first builds itself with the JDK you provide (gcj-jdk) and then it rebuilds it with icedtea6 itself; but to rebuild itself, it sets the JAVA_HOME variable during build, hoping for ant to pick it up. But by choice of the Gentoo Java team, the JAVA_HOME variable is not supported nor respected, so the override fails, and it tries to build itself still with the previous compiler, the wrong one.
How can this work for anybody then, like Andrew said ? Well the trick is in the keyword you use. On stable systems, ant-core-1.7.0-r3 from the Java overlay is picked up, which contains an hack from Andrew (no you cannot call it “the proper way” since it does not fix the comments; if your idea of hack does not encompass doing a change and leave the opposite comments still there, then I start to worry…) to allow respecting JAVA_HOME. If you are on unstable systems, you’re going to get ant-core-1.7.1 from the main tree, that version does not have the hack, and thus will fail to build IcedTea6. I’m not sure where David Philippi have seen ant-core-1.7.1-r1 from java-overlay, since it still has the old version.
So I decided that even if it does not conform to my usual QA strictness, I wanted to try out IcedTea6. The reason for that is that I’m addicted to Yahoo Games and I haven’t found any free software package yet that supports playing online to Canasta, for instance… and I was tired to use the laptop for that since I have Yamato here all the time. I then disabled my --as-needed compiler (the build system fails when it comes to properly order the linking lines), installed the hacked ant-core, and merged icedtea6.
This time 1.3.1-r1 finally merged and I could try it out, good! about:plugins on Firefox shows me that it’s picked up, but … once I get to Yahoo games page, it does not really work: the “table” window opens, but then it does not load the applet, it goes in timeout and tries to reload; does so a few times, then Yahoo tells you to disable popup blockers.
I tried a couple more applets along the line, but it still failed quite badly, crashing a couple of time. Yeah we’re on the road to a Free Java, but we’re certainly not there yet.
On the other hand, if somebody knows how to debug problems like the ones I described above, I’d be glad to provide more information to the icedtea/openjdk developers to see that they get resolved and we can finally have a working nsplugin on AMD64.