On Sun, Apr 16, 2000 at 02:55:45PM -0500, Aaron M. Renn wrote:
> Tom Tromey ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> > Nic> What do the Classpath folks think of setting up a subversions
> > Nic> module called:
> > Nic> javax
> > Nic> where we put the code for javax stuff that it outside the Classpath
> > Nic> project.
> >
> > Why not put it in Classpath? I'm all for that.
>
> I have no objections to this. I think there was some reason that was
> discussed some time back about reasons not to include extensions directly
> in the Classpath archive. I think Paul was the person who came up
> with them though.
One "problem" is that it is more work since all these extensions have
different versions and new versions are released all the time.
This is a problem with the javax.servlet classes which Paul Siegmann
solved by creating a small preprocessor that can generate
Different Servlet engines need different versions of the classes.
Another is the fact that the legal issues are not always clear since there
is often (but not always) a click-through license to access the specification
(although almost always the api-doc is public).
RMS has once said that if people may use the specs to publish books about
the api then we should be allowed to publish implementation code for that
api (And I agree since nothing can explain a api better then code that
implements it :)But that does not stop people from worrying about these
legal issues.
So you have to find people that want to coordinate the releases and
track the legal issues. But if you can find those then I am all for
including these standard extensions in classpath (or call it classpathx :).
Cheers,
Mark
