Hi all, Wanted to share my thoughts on the next snapshot 0.07 and what should be done before we can really start thinking about GNU Classpath 1.0. These are just suggestions so please yell and scream (politely) if you have other ideas about this.
0.07. The best thing for the next snapshot is to just set a date when we want to release it. I propose to just set this at the last week of November (three months from now) since we are already making real progress. Look at the bug/patch database for a number of improvements to object streams, java.text, rmi and javax.naming that are just waiting to get checked in. Much thanks go to the Kaffe team that has been importing Classpath libraries like mad the last couple of weeks and simultaneously debugged them and provided patches! And apologies to anyone whose patches didn't make it for the 0.06 release. If that works out then we can just keep on doing snapshot releases every three months till... 1.0. This is the release everybody is really waiting for. It should give people enough functionality to be useful for creating real projects (from full featured JDKs that people create on top of GNU Classpath) and it should be polished enough that we feel it is worth to maintain it (while we start working towards 2.0). We cannot set a date for it, but we can list the requirements that should be met to make it happen: - At least the same functionality as other 1.1 JDK core classes provide. (We have most of the packages needed to provide, but debugging to get them all working correctly will take some time. The main missing part has always been the AWT (peers) but the gcj hackers are really working hard on them. The wonka visual test tool that Thomas recently imported into Mauve will certainly help with this effort. Since we clearly have already so much more then plain 1.1 we might set the goal a bit higher to include everything that people expect from 1.1 plus the extensions described in the java class libraries second edition, volume 1 supplemental. Plus of course everything from 1.3 and 1.4 that we can clearly show is ready. But getting a minimum 1.1 set of packages all at the same minimum level should be the first goal.) - Clean and stable VM interface that makes implementing a VM and/or compiler based on GNU Classpath easy. (We have a start with the various VM[ClassName] classes inside the vm/reference directory. We should extend these with the proposals for e.g. VMThread and VMSecurityManager that were already proposed on the list and they should be better documented in the vmintegration guide. Ideally even gcj and kaffe would use this VM interface, but the main target are the free VMs that realy exclusively on GNU Classpath as core library implementation.) - Up to date documentation that at a minimum provides a reference like overview of what we have and what each class/method does. And clearly describes what is work in progress/non-functional stubs. (gjdoc really helps here. And our api doc isn't that bad. We really need to write some package.html overview pages for the packages that we feel agree really useful though. We also might need to hack a bit on gjdoc to make do everything we want - like including pictures.) - Testsuite that can be used to see if the libraries work as expected and that we can use to spot regressions while we work on future versions. (We use Mauve for that and it is already pretty good to show regressions on parts of our library, but it needs a bit of cleaning up to make it more generally useful. Also some packages don't have any tests at all.) We aren't that far from 1.0. But polishing everything up and the general rule about "the last 10% takes the other 90% of time" do apply. Hopefully we can come up with a useful task list for 1.0 (we already have a task list on savannah, but I don't if people really use that). But above all, keep having fun, keep on hacking! Cheers, Mark P.S. Speaking about the future of software. Please take the time to read the following important information about patents in Europe: http://swpat.ffii.org/ If you live in Europe and can make time, please join the protest in Brussels next Wednesday (Aug 27 2003): http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/demo0819/index.en.html If you cannot make it, please join the online demonstration: http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html And/Or try to help in other ways: http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html Hope to see some of you in Brussels on Wednesday! Help with lodging and traveling in groups is coordinated at: http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/BigDemo27aug And the #bxl-ffii channel on irc.freenode.org _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath