Re: Aicas again

[Dalibor Topic]

If the new native layer code turns out to be something that does more 
harm then good, then it should be either autoconfiscated, to save what 
makes sense saving, or reverted and presumably gradually rewritten to 
remove the macros for good. I am not sure if it's too early to tell, I 
have not looked at the rewrite in past week myself.

I doubt that will change much for Darwin, either way, since Darwin is 
different enough from Linux to trigger portability issues. The same 
would be the case if GNU Classpath had more developers using Cygwin, 
which also gets regularly broken, in my experience, and will get 
regularly broken in the future no matter what approach to portability 
layers we take.

Runtimes that care about niche platforms like Darwin, Cygwin, Solaris, 
or eCos are at any time able to write and maintain their own code for 
the native layer anyway thanks to the VM interface layer, and several 
runtimes seem to be working fine that way. I think the interesting 
question is where to draw the line what needs to be included in GNU 
Classpath (and at what cost) and what doesn't.

I believe we'll be able to draw a clearer line once the last native 
layer experiment is over, but I haven't been following the discussion 
closely enough to be able to tell if it is over by now, or if the 
current state of afairs is some transition state to something else.

cheers,
dalibor topic