Hello,
As we should be looking at working on the Java IDE part now (vote for the
platform release is running), I guess it is time to discuss what exactly we
do with nb-javac. Most of the Java editing features depend on a library
called "nb-javac" (features that are not Java related should work even
without nb-javac), which is basically a fork of javac from OpenJDK (under
GPLv2+CPE) with adjustments to make it work better inside NetBeans. This
cannot be distributed with Apache NetBeans, but my understanding is that
the user can add the library manually (and that the IDE can help with that):
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-279
So, I wonder what exactly do we do. There are two options:
a) just provide guidance to the user to manually download the library and
place it at the proper place. The current infrastructure mostly supports
this, we just might need to have some better texts in the initial dialog
about modules that cannot be enabled.
b) attempt to more automatically download the library - this would need
some more work I think, and I wonder if this is acceptable. (Also, there
may be proxy issues, as the IDE would not be really started at that point.)
Another aspect is from where to download the library: I assume we would
need a reasonably stable place to which we could point the users.
Are there any opinions on this?
Thanks,
Jan
