From: Alexandre Oliva (oliva@dcc.unicamp.br)
Date: Tue Feb 09 1999 - 22:14:35 EST
On Feb 10, 1999, Godmar Back <gback@cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>> On Feb 9, 1999, Godmar Back <gback@cs.utah.edu> wrote:
>> 1) keep trying to duplicate the Classpath effort
>> 2) branch off Kaffe and adopt Classpath.
>> Neither option seems very good to me, but if Tim and Peter say `no' to
>> adopting Classpath's work, we don't have any other...
> If that's your position, you should consider leaving this Kaffe project
> and start your own branch.
When I said `neither seems good to me', I meant `not as good as
sharing the effort instead of duplicating it'
> I have an investment in Kaffe, and I don't see any reason to use
> classpath. In fact, every time I checked out their CVS sources and
> tried to build them, it failed in some automake file for me. Go
> figure.
That's their fault, as I have already explained to you in private.
However, AFAIK, their implementations are much closer to the
specification than Kaffe's, and that's why I think it would be nice to
adopt them. Some people that work here at Unicamp with Kaffe and
Guaranį frequently find bugs in the Kaffe API, and they're not usually
skilled enough to debug them, so I have to do it or ask them to submit
bug reports.
Adopting Classpath would have one benefit, which is that of increasing
the amount of people working on the project, and another expected
benefit of decreasing the number of bugs in the API implementation.
> It is them who duplicate: classpath started in April 98, two months after
> Tim announced that he was working on a free implementation.
I agree. Nevertheless, they have evolved much faster than us, and I
don't expect this to change in the near future :-( So, now, we're the
ones duplicating the effort :-(
> In August, I had discussions with some of the people in the classpath
> project who accused Tim of dividing the "free software community"'s efforts.
> This is ridiculous.
Not only ridiculous. It is unfair. They have divided it in the
beginning.
> I want us to get some advertisements out to attract more volunteers,
> similar in form to the classpath's pages.
Great!
> However, I would personally like it if donating code to kaffe is an
> act that does not restrict your ownership of that code in any way,
> which is not (quite as) true for classpath or other FSF-sponsored
> projects, because of the FSF's agenda for what they call "social
> engineering".
If we adopted Classpath, we could keep local modifications contributed
from people not willing to assign their code to FSF. It might make
regular merges harder, but then, I believe Tim has a hard time
whenever he tries to merge his sourcebase with Kaffe's, and the only
effect of adopting Classpath's version would be that he could share
part of that job with someone else.
> Also, Tim & Peter have donated their disk space, reputation, man
> power and webspace for the public VM so far *without* being able to
> sell the efforts you or I put into it. I don't want this to be
> forgotten, just as you should not forget that Kaffe wouldn't exist
> without Tim's effort at all.
I'd never forget that. He's made my MSc work possible (or at least
much easier), and he deserved a personal acknowledgment for that in my
Master Thesis (if that's worth anything :-)
Also, I understand that he's spent quite a lot of time implementing
the existing Java Core API for Kaffe, but most of the work was put in
the virtual machine, which I find great, while the API implementation
was done in a hurry (AFAIK). I believe Classpath's implementations
are more complete, because they're not done under so much pressure,
and they seem to be very careful about *full* compliance.
That's why I'd like us to adopt it, if Tim and Peter would agree with
it. If they do not, that's fine, I'm not going to branch off Kaffe
(although I have already done, for Guaranį :-), nor am I going to stop
contributing to it, because I really value the work Tim and Peter have
done.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva aoliva@{acm.org}
oliva@{dcc.unicamp.br,gnu.org,egcs.cygnus.com,samba.org}
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil
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