On 11/03/11 01:14, 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.
That's the main point for me - I want to get easy updates - checking
out code from a repo is much nicer than having to download a tar and
apply your changes. Mercurials update and merge capabilities are great.
BTW - its important that whatever process is documented is one that's
used by developers. So though it may be tempting to have complete
snapshots of a build tree available - unless someone actively proves
they work, its best to have a singular process that *everyone* uses
everyday.
Checking out using hg is simple - the only wart is the forest extension
and that's only because its unclear what the community view is on using it.
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.
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
