RE: The status of Classpath (in brief)

[Grzegorz B. Prokopski]

W liście z nie, 04-01-2004, godz. 18:15, David Holmes pisze: 
> My only comment is that a stated goal of "at least as complete as 1.1"
> is no longer adequate. The Java platform is a moving target and 1.5 is
> on the horizon.

As Mark has mentioned somewhere it'd probably be the topic of one of
the discussions during FOSDEM.

Personally, I think that GNU Classpath to Sun's "standards" is in
similar situation as Wine to MS API. The smart question is:
what the Wine guys have set as their 1.0 (or 0.9) goals? [0]

Taking Wine as an example - things like:
* testing suite
* compatibility list for _applications_
* no grave bugs ;-) [or having them known/documented]
* documentation
come to mind. (speaking from memory of Wine-devel discussions)

For GNU CP the question that arises the most often is:
toward which version is it heading?
And Mark's answer is right (in another part of his essay):
none - GNU CP is driven by what is needed for the _applications_
(which people want and make possible to run).

Of course running an app requires JVM with certain features. But by
"being able to run an app" I understand that given correct support from
a JVM - it is possible to run an app with GNU CP and this JVM.

So it might be not bad idea to declare a set of _apps_ as (part of)
1.0 goals. And I also think that it would be more substantial than
"80% or 1.2 compatibility" or sth. - which doesn't mean much, really.
And people would be able to take a look at ex. website and check what
they *actually* can expect to run.

Damn, I was to keep this proposal till FOSDEM ! *g* ;-) [1]

Cheers,

                                        Grzegorz B. Prokopski

[0] http://www.winehq.org/site/todo_lists (this is list for 0.9, I
couldn't find the list for 1.0 ATM - they must have hidden it ;-)
[1] Obviously I don't claim prior art on the idea. It's a joke.
-- 
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <address@hidden>
Debian GNU/Linux      http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPLed JVM  http://www.sablevm.org