Re: [Cp-tools-discuss] Re: Planning to check-in new branch: the GIOP extensions for rmic.

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 13:25 -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Tom" == Thomas Fitzsimmons <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Tom> In fact, long term, I'd rather see all of the tools in cp-tools
> Tom> merged into cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/classpath and used by
> Tom> all bundlers of GNU Classpath.
> 
> Yeah, I agree.  This has a number of benefits, and I can't think of
> any drawbacks.
> 
> We discussed this on irc a bit and one thing that came up was
> licensing.  In particular, I think we want to be sure that the various
> tools are usable in a typical java environment -- so for instance I
> think we want it to be clear to end users, packagers, etc, that it is
> fine for 'ant' to load gjdoc (or any Classspath tool) from the
> tools.jar.
> 
> From my perspective this would be simplest if we made sure all the
> tools were also GPL+Exception.  This would also make it simpler to
> refactor code across the tool/core boundary.

OK lets do this. We want to integrate this code with the core class
libraries because that makes it technically much easier to maintain it
and prevents duplicating code. The other reason is that we want to
provide a full free replacement for the java platform. And applications
(both proprietary and free) do depend on these tool classes.

Sorry this decision took some time. I wanted to make sure I understood
all implications of it. And make sure that I had talked to and asked
people their opinion before making any decission (or rather ask the FSF
to make such a decission). Clearly the FSF is the copyright holder of
this code so can make such decisions (I made sure RMS agreed with doing
this). But I also wanted to make sure that people who contributed their
code to the FSF under the GPL were not opposed to distributing it under
GPL+Exception. And it seems people think it is a good idea. So lets make
sure everything under teh tools directory is distributed under GPL
+Exception from now on. Then we can also incorporate the other tool
classes from cp-tools and gjdoc there (*).

I was a bit hesitant to do this because GNU Classpath is already pretty
big. So I do want to make clear that we will only provide those
extensions with GNU Classpath that are also distributed with the gratis
proprietary sdk libraries AND there are real applications (including
free software ones) that depend on them to be available to build and
function correctly. Otherwise such tool classes should not be part of
the GNU Classpath core classes. Then they should just be extra tools
distributed outside GNU Classpath as a separate project (and preferably
distributed under the GPL imho).

> Tom> Toward that end, I plan to propose merging gcjappletviewer into
> Tom> GNU Classpath once the security work is done.
> 
> Excellent!

We reviewed the code and made sure the origin and the paperwork is OK.
gcjwebplugin is already distributed under the GPL+Exception which we
will keep that way when incorporating it. Since we clearly want (for
tactical reasons) to allow running non-free applets and such a plugin is
part of any standard jre.

Tom and Michael wanted to make one final release of gcjwebplugin before
importing it.

Cheers,

Mark

(*) That is the following list of files:
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javah/GnuByteCodeJavah.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javah/Javah.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javah/JavahMain.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javap/GnuByteCodeJavap.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javap/Javap.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/javap/JavapMain.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/native2ascii/Native2ASCII.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/registry/RegistryImpl.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/registry/RegistryImpl_Skel.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/registry/RegistryImpl_Stub.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/Compile_gcj.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/Compile_jikes.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/Compile_kjc.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/Compiler.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/CompilerProcess.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/RMIC.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/RMICException.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/rmi/rmic/TabbedWriter.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/serialver/SerialVer.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/Util.java
src/gnu/classpath/tools/gjdoc/*.java
src/com/sun/javadoc/*.java

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