FOSDEM07

Last weekend I was at FOSDEM for the first time. It was great to meet all those people working on Gentoo and FOSS java. On Sunday morning I gave a presentation on Gentoo Java for which you can find the slides at http://dev.gentoo.org/~betelgeuse/GentooJavaFOSDEM07.pdf. Although the presentation was at 9:00 am there was between 20 and 40 people which was quite nice. If we get a couple more people participating as a result of that, it was so totally worth it. It was very nice to hear that Sun is really trying to do the OpenJDK project right but of course it shows that they are a company after profits. Not that there is anything wrong with that as it pays the bills. Some bad news for the people waiting for OpenJDK:

• The browser plugin is not getting GPL:ed now
• When class library comes available it will still have encumbered parts
• The JCK requires manual work so we can’t call something installed from ebuilds Java unless the rules change

But in time the nsplugin and the encumbered parts will be removed. A list of other good things:

• Gentoo has more packages than JPackage
• Sun is planning to make OpenJDK installable without a JDK already installed so we should not have nasty boostrapping issues to solve.

As a result of FOSDEM I now I have a very clear picture on what would be nice to get done in the Gentoo Java land this year. Things for 2007:

• Virtuals support: Just depend on virtual/jmx and you will get either virtual/jdk:1.5 or mx4j-core
• Maven support: Probably going to use the JPackage work
• A configuration tool for wrappers: Now you need to do a little digging to find how to control settings on a per launcher basis
• Package OpenJDK
• Phase out ebuilds using Generation 1 by migrating to Generation 2 or moving the ebuilds to a graveyard overlay
• Recruit a couple of new developers for Java