creating standalone gij/gcj builds

Mon Feb 23 13:48:00 GMT 2004

Arnaud Vandyck wrote:
> Jens Lehmann <jens.lehmann@goldmail.de> writes:
>> Hi Jens,
>> You are using Debian, aren't you? 

Yes, I am. :-)
>>>I recently used gcj and gij for the first time and am very interested
>>>in this project. However I find it very difficult to use it in eclipse
>>>(and probably any other IDE) as a Standard-VM. It's required to
>>>compile gcc and make various changes to get it working. I'm still
>>>having problems, but this is not the topic of this thread.
>>> You can install gcj from the Debian package:
>> $ dpkg -l gcj gij
>> ii gcj 3.3.2-2 The GNU Java compiler
> ii gij 3.3.2-2 The GNU Java bytecode interpreter

Installing gij/gcj using Debian packages is not a problem. I can compile 
and run fine on the commandline. Integration in eclipse is more complicated.
>>>Of course everything would be significantly easier, if gij/gcj would
>>>provide a similar installation, like the J2SDK does. This means a
>>>packed file for different platforms you can simply extract somewhere
>>>and you are ready to run. By using the same/similar directory
>>>structure and file names, you could use gcj/gij very easy in existing
>>>IDEs.
>>> 1Â° Maybe it's more a distro thing;

Maybe, but it should be made easy for the distros. Having standalone 
builds also enables developers to run multiple versions of gij/gcj 
without problems (I already have several VMs installed), so they can 
test upcoming beta releases easier.
> 2Â° About Debian, you can maybe join the debian-java mailing list and ask
> for this ('gcj, gij have a J2SDK like tree structure'), I think some
> people will be interresting. We probably post something related to
> this in less than a month ;-)

I'm already reading the list (a lot of spam btw.). I'll probably send 
you a private mail to get some of my thoughts regarding free Java and 
Debian sorted.
> 3Â° Also, gcj does provide a lot of tools but not all (gjdoc is not a
> part of gcj AFAIK).

You're right. It belongs to classpath. That's a problem indeed.
Jens