[Kde-java] Should we ditch support for Sun's JDK in favour of Free Software?

[Richard Dale]

On Thursday 15 April 2004 21:49, Dominique Devriese wrote:
> Richard Dale writes:
> > Maybe this is a rant, but I use LinuxPPC and the most recent version
> > of the jdk is 1.3.1. Here is a mail to the java at gcc.gnu.org from
> > Kevin Hendricks, who used to do Blackdown ports to LinuxPPC I
> > thought.
> >
> > Lets all move to gcj, what is the point of supporting Sun's stuff
> > unless we're paid - we don't need them?
>
> Are there specific problems with supporting the Sun and/or IBM JDKs ?
> I have no objection to remove the support, but if it's not too much
> work, why not keep it for those who need it ?
No problem at supporting the current JNI based bindings. They are entirely 
autogenerated, so they'll always be there. I can keep the api in step with 
version 2 of the bindings for KDE 3.3 - ie mainly type safe emit and 
splitting the kde classes up into packages. 

But I'm thinking of version 2 of the java bindings that use dynamic proxies, 
the Smoke library and AOP stuff. If I have to develop a JNI version as well 
as a CNI (gcj specific) version it would mean extra development time. JNI is 
really slow and harder to interface with C++ than CNI. 

Sun's jdk is dead on PowerPC, so WORA doesn't work at all for me. What if I 
wrote a serious java app for Linux PowerPC a couple of years ago, and then 
found future support depends on unpaid volunteers who donate their time for 
Sun's profit? Why should myself, as an unpaid volunteer, attempt to prop up 
this failure?

-- Richard