Re: OpenJDK support

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 04:22:25PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> > We are bootstrapping with GCJ.
>> 
>> And kudos to you Ricardo for doing the right thing.  It’s much more
>> confidence-inspiring than the above snippet.  :-)
>
> Yes, it is very impressive in fact. Of course the journey starts here.
>
> Maven provides similar functionality as rubygems, e.g.
>
>   http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/junit/junit
>
> this could mean we can write an import command that fetches 
> dependency info from maven.

Yes, I’ve been thinking about this too.  It seems that we could get
dependency information from pom.xml files, though I’m not sure how we
can canonicalise names.  It seems that what matters to Maven is the
identifier of binary artifacts on the central Maven repository.  I don’t
know how this is derived and if the name of the library is used at all.

> It looks like we can tell maven to find jars on the local 
> system. Jars we have built already. So we can use it as a 
> build system. I think that is a prerequisite.

Yes.  I have no experience with Maven, but it is crucial that we can
tell it use what’s already in the store.  I do not know if this is
possible as we rebuild jars and thus the binary artifacts probably
differ from what Maven might expect.  We would have to figure out what
Maven’s expectations really are and how we can satisfy them without
using binaries from the central Maven repository.

> Even so, getting all these jars built is going to be quite a job...

I’ve already built a couple of jars that we need for a working Maven
with a preliminary ant-build-system.  I welcome contributions on this
end, because I’m not familiar enough with the unwritten assumptions of
Java libraries and systems.

I’ll update the ant-build-system soon and then submit a couple of
patches for libraries needed to build Maven from source (without having
to use a bootstrap Maven that’s automatically downloaded when building
Maven with Ant).

~~ Ricardo