ZipInputStream brokenness

Mon Sep 2 16:25:00 GMT 2002

On 2 Sep 2002, Adam Megacz wrote:
> > Speaking for myself, I don't see a win from merging the classpath code.
> > I'd rather spend time fixing the I/O.
>> Thanks for volunteering. When do you expect to complete this?

Heh. Not sure if that's a serious question, but in any case the answer as
always is "whenever I can get to it, if nobody beats me to it".
Allow me a brief personal note, it's a US holiday, after all...
Working with gcj (and all of GCC) is a blast, I don't regret trying it
over the past few years, frustrating as it may be at times. I was
getting rather bored with Sun's Java program, you see. Nowadays I'm
more intereseted in cool, useful patches for gcj (like interpreter
stack traces! yay!) than new releases from Sun (1.4, yawn).
That said, I'd love to spend more time hacking for libgcj, but like others
I have a day job (and am the sole provider for a family of seven). I'm
sure not known for turning patches around quickly. I admire those who
can. And since my day job involves little coding anymore, I may get a
little rusty at times.
Which is fine with me anyhow since I've come to believe "less is more" in
software. I'm more likely to take what others have done and tweak it than
submit mega-patches of new or rewritten code. That philosophy fits well
with free software, it turns out. I'm fortunate that virtually all the
code I ever need already exists, often as free software.
I sense you're getting frustrated with the process. I can understand
that. Myself, I had hoped that 3.2 would be stable enough to use
throughout our organization... it is awfully close, but I've been saying
that for too long. I hope you can stay around and continue to
contribute. Look at it this way: soon it'll be the 20th anniversary of
the GNU manifesto and RMS still doesn't have his complete GNU system.
Yet the FSF hasn't changed course, the manifesto is still a good and
appropriate read today. Progress is still being made. (And while I
am by no means an RMS loyalist or follower, I've come to realize after 15
years of hard work I've contributed to nothing except temporary wealth for
very few people, while I've endured some very poor business decisions
made for short-term gain.)
And thanks for XWT, it's on our radar of things to evaluate "soon". I
think it might be just perfect for a CMS user interface.
Jeff