java-gcj-compat status

I submitted my ecj option parsing patch to Eclipse.

The patch went into Rawhide’s eclipse-ecj last night, which meant I was able to remove the last option munging stuff from java-gcj-compat. Behold:


$ ls -l /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin
jar -> /usr/bin/fastjar
java -> /usr/bin/gij
javac -> /usr/bin/ecj
javadoc -> /usr/bin/gjdoc
javah -> /usr/bin/gjnih
rmic -> /usr/bin/grmic
rmiregistry -> /usr/bin/grmiregistry

No wrapper scripts, just direct symlinks. All these tools are now command-line compatible with their proprietary equivalents.

java-gcj-compat’s remaining holes are representative of the entire free stack’s J2SE deficiencies. Specifically:

  1. dependencies on external crypto providers
  2. no CORBA tools
  3. no Java plugin

These are the areas that we need to focus on this year. 1 should be pretty easy; just a matter of merging GNU Crypto, Jessie and Bouncy Castle into GNU Classpath. 2 will be harder. Ideally we could get JacORB dual-licensed LGPL/GPL+exception, reimplement all the non-free OMG headers it uses and merge it into GNU Classpath. Quite a bit of effort. 3 will be harder still; we’ll need to finish libgcj’s security implementation (with test suites and everything) and fix many bugs in our AWT and Swing implementations.