[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nelson Minar) writes:
> I really don't want to be too critical of Blackdown. They've done a
> lot of really good work in a very difficult environment. But the
> releases and communication from Blackdown in the past few months have
> been pretty bad. We're fairly far behind in ports. Worse, though, is
> the lack of communication. We're told a new release is coming out "any
> day", then don't hear anything for weeks.
I agree.
I have felt for a long time that the solution is to do away with the
closed porting team, and simply release the JDK source code *and*
Linux-specific patches under the SCSL license. That way those of us
with a vested interested in getting Java to actually work on Linux can help.
I am sure that the participants on this mailing list alone have broad
enough experience, and a large enough set of hardware environments, to
help develop and test the JDK for Linux. One thing I noticed is that
apparently nobody on the Blackdown team has an SMP system, nor are they
testing the JDK against big workloads or anything with many threads.
The thing is, you can get the JDK 1.2 sources under the SCSL from Sun.
And you can get Linux patches from the Blackdown team. But guess what?
The two don't go together. The Blackdown patches are against an (apparently
unreleased) JDK tree internal to Sun, newer than the one you can get
under the SCSL. I tried in vain to merge the JDK sources with the
Blackdown patches, but there are too many conflicting changes.
This porting effort is clearly not working. It hasn't been working for
a long time. If Sun is serious about supporting Java on Linux they'll put
the SCSL to the test and use it in this case. Otherwise, everyone will
simply jump ship and move over to using IBM's JDKs. I know many already have.
Matt Welsh, UC Berkeley
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