Hi Jim ! Kaffe has been quite dormant these weeks and it is also probably my fault. I am just damn busy with ph.d work.
* I like Kaffe because it has helped me learn a lot of things from computers without hurting me too much by looking at large project. Also I guess kaffe can still be easily ported to other architecture. * I have a partly working new jit3-v2.0 which is able to cope with 64 bits arch. AMD64 is still giving some failures in the test suite (something like 30 failures for 160 tests). I will update the other jit3 when I have this one working. I hope to anyway check it in CVS after the next release. * AWT needs some work. I have not had time to check by myself but Riccardo reported there was problems running it. It will also be great to finish porting our X native peerless AWT to make it work with Classpath's "Swing" toolkit. * On the hosting part, I am fairly open. Having a personnal webserver has certainly its advantages but sourceforge.net, savannah ... may handle cvs/svn directly in a more efficient way. I would vote to keep our webserver for testing purpose though (running qemu-vm, having a tinderbox...) and maybe the handling of webserver. Cheers, Guilhem. Jim Pick wrote: > Hi everybody, > > It's been a quiet month on the mailing list so far. That's partly my > fault, I think, since the mailing list was broken for some time. > > It looks like the last CVS commit was 5 weeks ago. > > I see Dalibor went to FOSDEM, and did some talking about Kaffe there. > So I'm assuming that the project isn't dead, it's just somewhat dormant. > It's been somewhat dead/dormant throughout much of it's history, but > it's still here, isn't it? :-) > > And clearly, all the free Java runtimes and Classpath are in a state of > transition, as we wait for Sun to release the rest of OpenJDK. > > I'd like to liven up the list a bit, and maybe start a bit of discussion > on where Kaffe should go next. > > Here are some things I'd like to talk about: > > * I definitely need to do some work on upgrading the server, and fixing > up the website. Currently it's running a really old version of Debian, > so it needs to be upgraded. I'm just scared of all the breakage that > will happen. I'm slowly building up my hosting capabilities, but it's > just a hobby, and I have real life things going on, so I move at a > glacial pace. If anybody wants to help out with any of that, I'd really > appreciate it. I happy to keep hosting it indefinitely. > > * I think a wiki running on top of Kaffe would be really nice. :-) > > * On the other hand, there are establishing free software hosting > platforms like Sourceforge, Savannah, Google Code, etc. that might > work better than just running everything on our own server. Our current > infrastructure is pretty much still using technology from the 1990s. We > don't even have a blog or a wiki, or any continuous integration or > distributed version control. I'm open to migrating things if that's > what people would prefer. > > * Technically speaking, I'm still the project leader, by virtue of > rescuing it from the ashes of Transvirtual. But Dalibor is really the > guy who has been doing most of the work. I'm not really doing much with > Kaffe personally, so if anybody else wants to step up and be a real > project leader, feel free to volunteer. I'm still happy to keep hosting > the project and helping out with the releases. > > * Speaking of releases, we really should do another release sometime. > > * I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't even have Kaffe running on my > new MacBook under OS X. I got it to compile, but I couldn't get it to > even run "Hello World". If I spent some time on it, I imagine I could > figure it out. I just haven't spent the time. I hope it still runs OK > on Linux, but I haven't tried that recently either. > > * I also haven't been responding to emails asking me for help getting > Kaffe to run. I'd like to, but since I don't even have it working for > myself, I'm not really in a position to help out. I get so much spam > nowadays that I hardly even use email anymore. I notice that most > requests for help to the mailing list are going unanswered as well. > > * I'm still interested in playing with Java virtualization, and I'm very > excited about OpenJDK coming out. JRuby looks really interesting to me. > For my own projects, I'm guessing I'd probably use OpenJDK in > preference to Kaffe in the future, since it's likely to be a lot less > effort to get it working the way I want it to. > > * That said, I think Kaffe has been a seminal project in terms of > getting free Java off the ground, and I'd hate to see it die. A lot of > interesting projects have used Kaffe as a starting point. > > * I imagine that in the future, people will most likely look to OpenJDK > as a starting point to add their enhancements. Is there still a role > for Kaffe to play here? > > * I think Kaffe probably is still the simplest full JVM implementation > that isn't just an interpreter. It's been used for all manner of exotic > porting projects that might just be too hard to do using something like > OpenJDK or gcj. > > * Kaffe is licensed under the GPLv2. So is OpenJDK. But Kaffe doesn't > require copyright assignment, and we're pretty open. Sun doesn't have > to vette the code going into Kaffe. That suggests that perhaps we could > merge in large parts of OpenJDK, and provide a place for people to do > really experimental stuff that Sun isn't going to permit in their > version. Is this something we should consider? > > * In other words, should we go big? And merge in as much stuff as > possible. That could be problematic, since Kaffe is already pretty > huge. Maybe we could adopt more of a "distribution" approach, and break > things into a bunch of modules that are all developed to work together? > > * Or maybe we should try to stay small? And just try to be an easily > hackable, simple virtual machine with a crude compiler framework, and > nothing else? That would involve jettisoning or spinning out a lot of > the integration work that's been done over the last few years, I think. > > * I think we've been trending towards the "go big" direction for some > time, with all the Classpath merging and other projects, and the core > has been somewhat neglected. It's been really good to support Classpath > this way, and it's helped to get a lot of Java stuff integrated into > Debian. On the other hand, I think the build itself is just too > intimidating. It's massive. I think most prospective developers would > probably give up before getting it to build the first time. Our > configure scripts are almost an operating system in and of themselves. :-) > > * If anybody is currently doing something interesting with Kaffe, or has > any aspirations for it, please send some email to the list! We need the > ideas and the traffic! > > Cheers, > > - Jim > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > kaffe mailing list > kaffe@kaffe.org > http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe > _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list kaffe@kaffe.org http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe