On 3/10/2011 5:14 PM, David Holmes wrote:
Dr Andrew John Hughes said the following on 03/11/11 10:57:
On 06:40 Fri 11 Mar , David Holmes wrote:
Stepping up a level, an initial download of openjdk need not involve
using mercurial at all. You can simply download a stable snapshot as a
tar file;
This makes much more sense as a starting point for new users over having
to handle Mercurial and checkouts. It works fine if you just want to
_use_
the latest and greatest, not hack on it.
Even if you want to hack you can still do your initial download this
way. The hg commands only come into play when you want to update
things later.
or download an install script that will do whatever is
necessary behind the scenes to get a complete openjdk.
I don't know how that would work. I guess IcedTea comes close to
this idea
in that it detects the needed settings for the build, rather than
them all
having to be passed as make variables.
I was thinking of a simple installer as used by various bits of
software. For example for Linux you might download a script that
simply contains the initial set of hg commands needed to get the
forest. On windows it might automate downloading a tarball and
extracting it.
No matter how we structure the end JDK "forest" (and, I'm using forest
in the generic term, not to infer use of the forest extension), I think
it would be a good idea to have a top-level clone script that people can
download for "one-click" usage.
Inside that script, we can do interesting things - say, like download a
pre-built tarball of the whole Hg repo, then refresh it. All sorts of
interesting tricks become available if we go the route of encapsulating
all the implementation details in a single script, and hide those
details from the end-user. They then end up with a stable interface to
doing common tasks.
-erik
Personally I'd
like to see that include the basic build tools as well - in which
case I
don't care about "special extensions" as I just get a working toolkit.
What do you mean by this? Can you give an example?
I know this is not what most people want and not how most OS handle
software packaging these days, but I think it would be useful to be
able to grab a tools bundles for a given OS that includes the various
tools and extras you need eg mercurial, ant, gcc, freetype - all the
things the build docs tell you that you have to go and get to build
openjdk. Just yesterday I had to go and grab freetype and get it
installed on a machine; today I've had to install gawk and
libasound2-dev. I find this a PITA.
I don't expect to see this happen, my point was that if you did have
easy access to pre-packaged tools, then it wouldn't matter if openjdk
required customized variants of those tools.
David
I think it's unlikely to be possible for the "developer install" script
to be able to actually do any installation of other software.
However, it would certainly be a good place to have a Sanity Check -
have the install script check for all the required software
dependencies, and then spit out a summary of what you have, and what you
are missing.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
