Re: [Kaffe] can the classpath ya da ya da ya - and some technical stuff

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From: Tim Wilkinson (tim@transvirtual.com)
Date: Thu Feb 11 1999 - 16:30:27 EST


Alexandre,

> > In the time I've been doing Kaffe I've had numerous offers of
> > libraries, help, ports and so forth - and almost without exception
> > absolutely nothing has come of them - possibly this is my fault but
> > I'm not sure how to manage this better (while running TVT as well).
>
> I've already talked to Godmar, in private, about your common lack of
> responsiveness. Many times, when I started hacking Kaffe, I felt as
> if you didn't care about what I was proposing because you just didn't
> reply, or didn't sound very glad with the ideas. But now I see you
> really don't mean any of that, it's just the way you are, it's not
> your fault. It becomes much harder to do something, at least for me,
> if I don't feel other people will like it.
>
> I'm not saying you have to spend all day writing e-mail with `Cool',
> `I love that idea' or `This improvement would be welcome' (we all can
> do that :-), I'm just trying to explain why I, and possibly others,
> have non contributed to Kaffe as much as we could. Now there are
> several people in the Kaffe Core that can welcome new contributors,
> and we can share the load of this kind of personal management with
> you. But it would be nice if you could still take some part of that,
> because people like to know that the ``king'' :-) is paying
> attention.

I know - this is very fair comment. Unfortuantely I really do spend as much
time on the mailing lists as I can spare - it's not enough but it's all I can
do. I do try to encourage people who contact me directly but I don't usually
chase them regarding things they say they'll do and I certainly don't
encourage enough. One of my reasons for forming the core group in the first
place was to let other people share that responsibility. Perhaps with
Godmar's new webstuff and perhaps a few new mailing aliases this process can
be improved (although nothing substitutes for private email).

> > Testing is a big issue and something we've addressing here - we recently
> > hired a guy to do QA for us so we've hoping to improve this.
>
> Great! BTW, I was wondering whether we should convert all our tests
> to the Mauve framework and start testing Kaffe with Mauve regularly,
> instead of, again, duplicating the effort.

I've been meaning to automate that process here but I think I'll let our
QA handle it now (now we actually have one :-) )

> > Now that you mention serialization, one of their important
> > decisions was to implement classes that were
> > serialization-compatible with Sun's implementation (but that
> > code that may be untested too). We'd have to spend quite a lot
> > of time in re-doing what they've already done :-(
>
> > Define a lot of time - I think I've spent more time on this conversation
> > than I did rewriting serialiazation :)
>
> As you probably already know, compatibility with JDK in terms of
> Serialization is not just a matter of the wire protocol: default
> serialization won't do for classes that don't have exactly the same
> structure, so, in clean-room implementations, any Serializable code
> that wishes to remain compatible with Sun's must explicitly define the
> class serial ID and implement read/writeObjectState methods, writing
> the fields exactly as specified by Sun. I believe Classpath has
> already done that, based on their previous discussions on this
> subject, but, again, I may be wrong.

Just so I've got something technical in this posting - it turns out that using
read/write methods isn't actually a replacement for default serialization
since that includes class field information which the read/write methods don't
capture. Sun added some new stuff to Java 2's serialization to help out here
- but I added the inner class thing to make it easier to provide that in our
cloned classes. I'll put the Java2 enhancements in once I finally get the SHA
stuff done (it isn't going to be today - again).

Cheers
Tim

--
  Tim Wilkinson                         Tel:     +1 510 704 1660
  Transvirtual Technologies, Inc.,      Fax:     +1 510 704 1893
  Berkeley, CA, USA.                    Email:   tim@transvirtual.com


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