Re: Fosdem discussions (Was: Importing GNU Classpath 0.20)

[David Gilbert]

Mark Wielaard wrote:

> This is one of the topics that I would like to discuss during the last
> part of our Fosdem meeting (Feb 25/26, Brussels):
>
>     http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/events/fosdem06.html
>
>        Sunday from 14:00 to 17:30 - "The Future"
>        Interactive technical hacker discussions on how to integrate the
>        projects more and move forward in the next year. 
>        
>        State of the world, beyond japi Mark Wielaard, GNU Classpath
>        Maintainer 
>        
>        After a short overview of the various free stacks, libraries,
>        compilers, tools and runtimes this session is mostly open
>        discussion about what work remains to be done and how to
>        integrate the various efforts better. Ideas for work items
>        welcome. 
>
> The extra "work items" I have now are:
>
> - Who is working on what?
>  Quick round where everybody tells what their personal, group,
>  organization/company work items are for the immediate and long
>  term future/next year.
> - Deployment: distribution and packaging for GNU/Linux distros.
>  Fedora just went through a round of, what looked from the outside a
>  bit painful, process of deploying lots of new packages based on GNU
>  Classpath and gcj for FC5. Debian is currently adding a lot of
>  packages (moving from contrib to main). Since both Debian and Fedora
>  hackers are attending it would be good to exchange success and failure
>  stories. Where can we as "upstream" help making deployment easier?
> - VM integration and interfacing.
>  There have been a couple of additions and changes this year
>  (net/socket, instrumentation) and cleanups like the VMStackWalker.
>  Also kaffe has moved much more closer to using GNU Classpath out of
>  the box. But both gcj and kaffe still maintain divergences. I will go
>  over the vm integration guide (and make sure it is up to date) and ask
>  whether or not what we currently have makes sense.
>
> Ideas for more things to discuss are of course welcome. As are
> spontaneous monologues on what people think is important to concentrate
> on for the next year.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark
>  
I've got a couple of points we could talk about:

(1)  The GNU Classpath version number

It's not a big issue, but the "0.20" version number does suggest a 
not-too-far-along-the-track project to people that aren't familiar with 
GNU Classpath.   Given the frequent releases that Mark puts out, why not 
call the next version "GNU Classpath, Release 21"...or use the YYYY.n 
versioning that some other projects use, and call it "GNU Classpath 
2006.2".  It would be better than GNU Classpath 0.21, and I'm sure there 
are obstacles to using "1.0.0".


(2)  Apache Harmony

Is there any real harmony left?  In spite of the initial promise, the 
amount of real collaboration is staggeringly low, as far as I can tell.  
What do others think?  Are there things that we can work on in 2006?  My 
suggestion:  let's clean up Mauve for a wider audience, and make it so 
that the Harmony developers can't resist using and contributing to it.


(3)  Celebration

2005 was a great year for GNU Classpath, let's celebrate!  Maybe 
something has already been arranged for the Saturday night of FOSDEM 
2006, and you're just not telling me... ;-)


Regards,

Dave