Jim Pick wrote:
Hi everybody,
* I imagine that in the future, people will most likely look to OpenJDK
as a starting point to add their enhancements. Is there still a role
for Kaffe to play here?
As a free open alternative probably.
It may be that it has had it's day and OpenJDK will take over. I would
not rush to bin it and I would not rush to alter it too much.
Too much change simply introduces instability - people will find other
JVMs that simply work
Someone needs to come up with a new charter for the project what is it
that Kaffe supplies that OpenJDK cannot? It may take some time to
discover what this really is.
* I think Kaffe probably is still the simplest full JVM implementation
that isn't just an interpreter. It's been used for all manner of exotic
porting projects that might just be too hard to do using something like
OpenJDK or gcj.
Which is a reason to keep it simple and easy to port.
* Kaffe is licensed under the GPLv2. So is OpenJDK. But Kaffe doesn't
require copyright assignment, and we're pretty open. Sun doesn't have
to vette the code going into Kaffe. That suggests that perhaps we could
merge in large parts of OpenJDK, and provide a place for people to do
really experimental stuff that Sun isn't going to permit in their
version. Is this something we should consider?
I would say stay clear of getting too close to OpenJDK - if there is
little difference between the two projects, it is Kaffe that is pointless.
* In other words, should we go big? And merge in as much stuff as
possible. That could be problematic, since Kaffe is already pretty
huge. Maybe we could adopt more of a "distribution" approach, and break
things into a bunch of modules that are all developed to work together?
Stability with quiet growth would probably keep Debian on board better.
* I think we've been trending towards the "go big" direction for some
time, with all the Classpath merging and other projects, and the core
has been somewhat neglected. It's been really good to support Classpath
this way, and it's helped to get a lot of Java stuff integrated into
Debian. On the other hand, I think the build itself is just too
intimidating. It's massive. I think most prospective developers would
probably give up before getting it to build the first time. Our
configure scripts are almost an operating system in and of themselves. :-)
Classpath is a bit special? You want a Java 1.X on top of Kaffe and
Classpath appears to be the way to get that - or support the equivalent
in OpenJDK.
--
Tim Bevan
Principal Software Engineer
+44 (0)1223 420 414
1Spatial Limited
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