Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings (java-gnome, GCC, gcj and kaffe)

[Mark Wielaard <mark klomp org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 10:04, James Henstridge wrote:
> In order to ship one of the Gnome bindings, the distro also needs to 
> ship the language the binding is for.  For example, the java binding in 
> the bindings release probably won't get distributed as widely as the 
> others because a lot of distros don't ship Java or a JDK.

You don't need "Java" or a (proprietary) JDK for java-gnome. This has
always been the case because Mark Howard the Debian java-gnome package
maintainer made sure of that. The Debian (and of course standard)
java-gnome always worked with Kaffe and GIJ (the GNU interpreter for
java) as distributed by Debian (even long before it became part of the
official Gnome Language Bindings).

GCC which should be packaged includes GCJ (gnu compiler for the java
programming language) and GIJ (gnu interpreter for java byte code) and
should be packaged by most distributions.

We use jhbuild for making sure GCC, GCJ and java-gnome work out of the
box. See the instructions for using jhbuild to integrate gcc, gdb,
cairo, gnome, java-gnome, etc from Thomas Fitzsimons on:
http://people.redhat.com/fitzsim/gcj-and-jhbuild.html

And any issues with new GCC/GCJ (4.0/CVS) and native compiled java-gnome
are tracked by Anthony Green so they won't turn into regressions for the
next release: http://spindazzle.org/java-gnome/

The debbuggtk, GTK applications for managing Debian bug reports, are
actually written in the java programming language and depend on these
packages. http://www.tildemh.com/sw/debbuggtk/
My own free software that is build on gnome and written in the java
programming language has also always been developed and deployed on
Debian (all with only standard packaged free tools and libraries
obviously). http://www.klomp.org/snark/snark-gnome.html

So I think at least for java-gnome there should be no real blocking
issues for not shipping it.

Cheers,

Mark