On Jan 31, 2006, at 11:32 AM, Roman Kennke wrote:
Hi Brian, hi list,
Yea, I think the point for me would be to keep Classpath's java
hackers
out of the business of writing native code, and especially out of the
business of porting native code for such common idioms as generic
file
operations, network operations, etc.
BTW, Torsten, the man who first wrote the target native layer, mostly
works on native code and porting of this to platforms you would not
dream of.
That is arrogant. I'm sure everyone here who hacks on Classpath has
worked with interesting technologies, and are all great engineers,
each in his own right.
So let's stop measuring cocks here, OK?
He is hardly a 'Classpath java hacker'. If the world was so
nice that posix and autoconf is the solution to everything, then such
work would hardly be necessary. But this seems to be a little
behind the
horizon of the brave GNU world. Man, all this narrow-mindedness
sets me
up, I think I better go back to java hacking ;-)
GNU Classpath is STILL a GNU project, and above all, we are trying to
support free platforms, and are first of all concerned with
supporting GNU (in it's GNU/Linux form). There is reams of evidence
that targeting mostly POSIX systems, and handling the divergences
with autoconf, produces a lot of software that is usable in a lot of
places (witness, all the programs of the GNU project).
Please, recognize that:
- Macro-based portability layers like this are ugly and extremely
hard to maintain and debug.
- The benefits of such a thing never materialized anyway, because
the only implementation available is for POSIX-like platforms. So it
STILL relied on POSIX and autoconf.
We have the responsibility, as contributors to a GNU project, to
maintain the project for the GNU system. GNU is sorta-POSIX, as are a
lot of other interesting platforms, and targeting them earns us, as
free software contributors -- not necessarily other groups or
companies that want to use Classpath -- a lot. I see these "native
portability layers" as being counter to that goal, and they
especially don't make sense given that there's no other free
implementations for platforms other than what we are targeting.
You can call that narrow-minded if you want, but we have to have
goals and rules for the project, and they should be mandated by the
larger project of which we are a part, which is GNU.
