[fedora-java] Fedora java packaging, icedtea vs gcj

[Thomas Fitzsimmons]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> Thomas Fitzsimmons writes:
>  > Sander Hoentjen wrote:
>  > > Hi all,
>  > > 
>  > > 
>  > > There is a program i would like to package (josm), only it doesn't
>  > > compile with gcj, but it does with icedtea. Can this go into fedora?
>  > 
>  > During the Fedora 8 Features FESCo meeting, the issue of build
>  > requiring IcedTea came up.  The informal policy decision was that
>  > packages may build require IcedTea, but must still run on the base
>  > Fedora architectures (i386, x86_64, ppc, ppc64) without requiring
>  > external packages.  For Fedora 8, that meant packages had to run on
>  > ppc/ppc64 libgcj.  For Fedora 9, IcedTea's ppc/ppc64 interpreter
>  > should suffice.  So while ideally the package would build on both,
>  > pragmatically I'd say go ahead and build require IcedTea.
> 
> I understand that, but it would surely be better in this case to get
> the fix into libgcj.  It's not particularly difficult to do, and
> surely we can be allowed the short time it would take to get the fix
> in, and then the package would run everywhere.  Sure, it's tempting to
> take the easy road, but in this case it's not hugely difficult to do
> the right thing.

Yes, I'm working on a fix for GNU Classpath.  However, understand that it does 
take a non-trivial amount of time to get a libgcj fix into Fedora, through the 
GNU Classpath -> gcc HEAD -> Red Hat gcc branch -> Fedora Rawhide chain -- 
several days at a minimum.  I'd rather not hold up Sander's progress waiting for 
the fix to land.

Tom