[fedora-java] decoupling libgcj from gcc.src.rpm

[Bryce McKinlay]

David Walluck wrote:
> While I have absolutely nothing to do with Fedora policy, I feel your
> pain with having to wait for gcc in order to do Java development.
>
> This is just the unfortunate consequence of having libgcj at all.
> Hopefully someone will eventually try to move forward and separate
> libgcj/classpath from gcc entirely.
>   
While in some ways it would be nice to separate libgcj from gcc, it is 
problematic to do so because the ABI is still evolving. While we usually 
try to keep the runtime backwards-compatible with old binaries, 
developers would need to be careful to keep their runtime up-to-date. 
This would quickly become painful, especially for GCC developers who 
just want to test that their changes don't break Java. Hopefully, in the 
future when the ABI has stabilized and pretty much any combination of 
compiler and libgcj will work together nicely, this will be the right 
thing to do.

In the mean time, I think separating them into different SRPMs for 
Fedora is a great idea and would solve most of the problem.

> Maybe this is too bold a request for FC5, but I would even love to see
> the latest libgcj HEAD used, so that we can have the latest classpath,
> 0.91 instead of being stuck in the ``stonegae'' with 0.20 or whatever
> version it is (albeit with patches).
>   
For FC6, we are going to backport the latest libgcj/classpath.

Bryce