John Keiser wrote:
> > From: Aaron M. Renn
> >
> > Hmm. If you're 90% done, it doesn't look like you need any help!
> > Your free
> > version is probably good enough. I'm not sure that we need to distribute
> > tools as part of Classpath anyway. I was thinking that there might be a
> > package called something like "GNU javautils" that contained these
> > miscellaneous utilities, though Paul wasn't so enthusiastic about
> > the idea.
> > Each one could be distributed separately for now. Things like jar should
> > definitely be easily usable with Kaffe without having to download
> > and build
> > our class libraries.
> >
>
> I agree with splitting it eventually ... there should be an entire "GNU
> Java" distribution that packages a GPL'd VM and Classpath together with a
> little more guarantee of it working. That seems like the appropriate place
> to put the tools.
>
> Until that happens, though, I see no trouble with leaving the tools in
> Classpath since we already have an existing project set up and there's
> really no point in incurring the setup overhead (time/energy taken away from
> Classpath) until we are at ready to create such a package.
Sun currently distributes Java in JDK versions and JRE versions. Not
including the tools is fine if you plan on making Classpath part of a JRE
implementation. The problem is a JDK distribution contains the tools and these
tools depend on the class libraries. Most of sun's tools are in sun.tools.* or
sun.security.* and the wrapper programs depend on finding them there. So if you
try to drop in Classpath in a Sun JDK distribution, all of the tools will stop
working because they depend on sun.* classes that do not exist. That is why
Classpath needs its own set of tools unless it starts providing sun.* classes.
Mark Benvenuto
