GNU Classpath meeting minutes LinuxTag, 12 July 2003, Karlsruhe (Germany) Present - Dalibor Topic (Kaffe) - Sascha Brawer (GNU Classpath) - Mark Wielaard (GNU Classpath) - Andy Wolter (Aicas) - James Hunt (Aicas) - Ingo Proetel (Aicas)
Sascha was the most organised and said someone should actually make notes, so here they are. Some of the notes were made in the Biergarten so take them with a grain of salt... I have surely forgotten something important. And sometimes I couldn't clearly remember the context of my notes. My applogies. If you were present and have more details please follow up with clarifications and additions. - Sascha has been working on font reading and rendering, see his very detailed architecture document, which describes all issues involved <http://www.dandelis.ch/development/fonts/>. Tim Tyler his public domain, pure java font rendering program was mentioned <http://fonteditor.org/> Adam Megacz of <http://www.xwt.org/> also needs this <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2003-07/msg00036.html>. - For the above and AWT/Swing in general the issue of accessing/mapping frame/display buffers came up multiple times. What interface should be defined for mapping these (java.nio JNI additions?). - OpenGL seems to have all the 2D drawing primitives that you ever want and implementations are widely available. - Aicas wanted to know who are interested in the Realtime specs being discussed in the OpenGroup and the jconsortium <http://www.opengroup.org/rtforum/rt_java/> <http://www.jconsortium.org/> Thet were also looking for participants in an open European standards project (which name I forgot to write down). - Aicas is working on some RMI fixups. During the discussion it came up that since object streams use serialization and serialization uses reflection, this only will work if you get all the details of reflection right. It was pointed out that reflection has some underspecified issues/bugs, for example see this note from Kissme (Class.getModifiers): // Arrays are always final and never an interface. // And also abstract (but that is actually a bug // - see JDC Bug: 4208179) // It matters for serial version UID calculations :{ There was much complaining about the broken design of the RMI protocol. It was suggested to look at how RMI can work on IIOP which is cleaner. - Sascha suggested to create a list of such issues and publish a list for GNU Classpath users/VM implementors of tricky/underspecified/buggy specs. - Mark wants to extend the VM interface with more VMState package local final classes like to JRVM people just did for a couple of java.lang classes to make it easier to use GNU Classpath with non-JNI/Posix based VMs. - The plan for character encodings is to move to the java.nio.charset interface. We already have required encodings for this. But GNU Classpath and gcj both still also have their old implementations (which are actually used in most places). gcj also has a libiconv provider (but not as java.nio.charset provider). A java.nio.charset libiconv provider would be nice to have for those systems that have that library. - Mark and Dalibor wanted to name next month Mauvegustus and clean up Mauve (it still contains some bogus/broken tests) and import as much tests from the different projects that have "non-standard" core library tests so they can be more easily shared between the different projects. Ingo dared Mark to create a Mauve plugin for Eclipse now that we have it running like the standard JUnit plugin. (The JUnit framework uses lots of reflection which we don't want to use for Mauve.) Other ideas were to create a standard JNI testsuite and maybe security issues/holes tests. - Acias has property files which lists which class/method needs which other class/method. This is nice when you are use smart or static linking of classes. - Kaffe has split up their library in different profiles (core, awt, xml, sound, rmi, etc) it would be nice if GNU Classpath also provided this. We could deliver different jar files. - We need to update/document the state of each package. It is not really clear how much has been implemented, signature complete (japitools), tested (has mauve tests), how compliant with which spec, etc. packages/classes are. Problem is that we don't have gatekeepers anymore per package (we had this in the past, but developers on the project changed and the number of supported packages has actually exploded). - The above is also important to show what people can do to help the project. We really need to setup a more visible task list then the current Savannah one with task people could do for the project which are annotated with how hard it would be it (simple -> follow existing example, like image provider or new character encoding, medium -> add something to an existing framework, like jar file verification for ZipFile, hard -> add complete new package or infrastructure). - We should have a standard NotYetImplementedException. Just returning something random (like null) from stubs is really not acceptable. Kaffe for example has one. - We really have a complete framework now to run significatly large applications. Getting semi-free application written in the java language (but which currently uses a proprietary runtime environment) running with a free VM is a great way to test and/or expand our classes and keeps us focused on the needs of free software developers. It would be really useful to have a "closure tool" which someone that has developed an application that he or she wants to get working with a GNU Classpath based VM can run and that tells possible problem areas/missing methods/classes that can then be used as a request for help on implementing the missing pieces. - How well does Antlr work and can we use it to generate parsers for things? (There was some talk about Antlr on the RHUG <http://sources.redhat.com/rhug/> mailinglist recently <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/rhug-rhats/2003-07/msg00001.html>). - There was some talk about sharing different things then just the core libraries such as jitters or a common shared compiled library format between VMs. Can be discussed on the GNU Classpath list at first, but will need a separate mailinglist if there is to much off topic (non-core classes) discussion. - The GNU Classpath homepage contains a list of free (non-)core libraries that are useful for developers and/or VM implementors. Is something missing? - Everybody had a really good time and looked forward to meet again in the future. Dalibor suggested the Linux-Kongress 2003 which will be from October 14 to October 16, 2003 in Saarbreucken, Germany, where he lives. _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath