On Thursday 29 June 2000, at 14 h 11, "C.M. Connelly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Following your suggestion, I took a look at Kaffe's Web site and > downloaded the source tar file.
There is no need to do so. Since there is a Debian package, 'apt-get install kaffe' should suffice. But: > 1. Compatibility. Kaffe isn't as up-to-date as the Sun/Blackdown > JDK, Stuff which is only available in a non-free software does not interest me. BTW, you pointed Sun's marketing plan: despite the hype about Java, the language is not perfectly free, since some features are not available to anybody. This sort of information seems to me more as Java-bashing than Kaffe-bashing. tell that to an assembly of C programmers and no one would want to switch to Java! > 2. Convenience. Kaffe isn't available as a binary package for > PowerPC. They do have Debian packages (unlike Blackdown), but > only for the i386 architecture. No, there is at least the Alpha version in Debian. (I didn't test it but the ".deb" is in the Debian archive.) > 3. Compilability. Kaffe simply doesn't build on PowerPC Linux > systems I wasn't aware of this problem (I didn't try kaffe on PowerPC). You should report this as a bug and an important one. Unless it is done, there is little incentive to work on the problem since kaffe's maintainer may be not even aware of the fact. > That means that presenting Kaffe as a free alternative to the > Sun/Blackdown JDK on PowerPC is a false lead -- I would rephrase it: if there is no Free Java solution (which means a real and workable one, on all platforms, and without segmentation faults at every opportunity), then we should stop working with Java and start encouraging people to switch to another language. -- http://www.debian.org/~bortz/
