More Progress

Anthony Green is my hero! He is doing what robilad was suggesting. If the mountain doesn’t come to the compiler, you bring the compiler to the mountain. He setup rhug a collection of java packages built with gcj. The current list of packages is nice and long. He now also made rhug RPMS available.

Some is creating a Graphical Configuration-Tool for Wine: “Its written in Java, is compiled to a native-Linux program via gcj and uses java-gtk as toolkit.” Nice, nice, nice.

Classpath/libgcj merging

Merged the GNU Classpath gnu.java.security.provider package with libgcj. And merged to GNU gcj javax.transaction package with Classpath. Which reminds me to finish the merging of javax.naming (JNDI) package that libgcj has. But I really want to create some documentation for it and it is a non-trivial package.

Progress

Did I complain about not enough progress in the free java community? I probably spoke to soon :)

Today I (with help from Andrew Haley) added a patch to GNU gcj for StackTraceElement support. Which means that we now have usefull exception chaining and that you can get at some nice meta information when your program throws exceptions.

Jeroen Frijters is building a JVM for .NET using GNU Classpath. He even supplies us with usefull bug reports.

The Jikes compiler has a new release (1.16) which adds support for assertions and kills some nasty bugs.

And since I had trouble getting ORP working with a recent Classpath CVS tree I tried Kissme which works out of the box with Classpath from CVS. I did find some bugs but it didn’t do that bad on the Mauve testsuite.

Certification

I really need to read some more about the certification and trust metric stuff because I just don’t seem to get it. And maybe I am using the certification completely the wrong way since the results surprise me so much.

I have gone from Apprentice to Master because robilad thinks I deserve that status. Thanks Dalibor! But I might give the impression that I sometimes work 24 hours on Free Software in reality I am certainly not doing that (the last two months have been horrible with almost no time for Free Software work). But I have made some changes to the priorities in my live and I will see it as a challenge to really become a Master one day, but currently I am barely a Journeyer. What surprises me is that the vote of one person can change your status so much.

The dairy rankings also surprise me. I have ranked a few dairies according to what I personally think what is interesting/uninteresting but for diaries that I have not yet rated the scores seem almost random to me. What surprises me the most is that although I have only given one dairy a rating of 9 there are a lot of diaries showing up with a rating of 10. I would have assumed that my rating was somehow a maximum rating for any dairies ‘downstream’. I clearly need to read more about how it actually works because it is certainly not intuitive to me.

Free Software community and Java

It is good to see more Free Software Java hackers on advogato (hi tromey, sab39, robilad, jpick, goran!). But progress is really slow. Almost a year ago I wrote: ” Seems that the Free Software community has finally all the pieces in place to provide a complete java programming environment.” Which is still true but I am a bit sad about the progress we made in the last year. It is not that there has no progress but it seems that people don’t use the free (as in speech) tools we produce but keep using the gratis (free as in beer) stuff that Sun and IBM produce. When looking at JBoss, Apache Jakarta projects or Eclipse you notice that people do like to create cool “Open Source” stuff but are absolutely not interested in the fact that they base their software on non-free libraries and tools. Some of the stuff works with the free java tools but it is clearly no priority at all :( It seems that people are more interested in the power that the Java environment gives them then to use free java tools to create really Free Software. I wonder what/if something can be done about that. Untill I figure that one out I guess we should just try harder to produce the best free tools we can to help people create a complete and truly free system.