A2DP support in Gentoo

I now have my A2DP headset working on Gentoo. You just need to emerge the latest version of bluez-utils (3.15) and follow the instructions in http://wiki.bluez.org/wiki/HOWTO/AudioDevices I put device in pairing mode for the Connect call and kbluetooth asked me the pin and then it was ready to work. Now I am using amarok to stream music to my headset. It’s probably to start thinking about getting the 3.X series stable.

Hooks removed from Java eclasses

Here is a mail I just sent to gentoo-dev-announce and gentoo-dev

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163262

Posting to announce because people might not have been able to use the
hooks in their bashrc files because of us using them in our eclasses.
Also if you see some weirdness with Java packages this might be the
cause although the patch was extensively tested.

Regards,
Petteri

The huge deptree of dev-java/mx4j

MX4J is an open source implementation of the JMX and JMX Remote API (JSR 160) specifications. The alternatives for mx4j are sun-jmx, which is fetch restricted, and 1.5 jdks where jmx is integrated into the JDK. Because of the fetch restriction a decision was made a while ago to use the OSS implementation. Because of the mx4j-tools that came with the dev-java/mx4j package the deptree was quite huge. For this reason wltjr added the java5 use flag to Tomcat. This use flag avoided depending on stuff that is provided by 1.5 jdks any way. Last Thursday this problem was solved for good by using the solution from http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152924. Now the latest ~x86 versions of dev-java/commons-modeler and www-servers/tomcat depend on the new dev-java/mx4j-core that has very minimal dependencies. If you are using ~arch, upgrading to these versions might help you clean some java packages with emerge -a –depclean.

Some of you have contacted me about my Avatar and not liking the military look of it. Well probably it is not such of a common sight in other countries but bear with me, I only have 27 mornings left.

Splitting ant

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176856

So soon ant-1.7.0 should be hitting the stable Gentoo machines. The biggest benefit here is that full ant with it’s big dependency tree shouldn’t be pulled in so often any more. Not all of the packages are migrated to splitted ant yet but the most important ones like Tomcat are. If you are interested in how this works I recommend you to take a look at the Ant guide we wrote:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/ant-guide.xml

Changes in Java overlays

If you use the java overlays see the following link:
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/March_2007_Summary#Changesinoverlays

The changes should allow a better experience to users of our overlays as we now have one central overlay where things are expected to work for layman usage and after we get it cleaned there shouldn’t be any experimental work in there. Initially I just moved migrated-java-experimental-overlay as java-overlay so initially there is still some experimental stuff left in that overlay but they should not have any keywords. If you have any problems, use our mailing list or IRC channel to get help.

Most of Sun’s Java class library under GPL now

http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/liftoff

betelgeuse@pena ~/openjdk/control/build/linux-i586 $ ./bin/java -version
openjdk version "1.7.0-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-betelgeuse_08_may_2007_21_32-b00)
OpenJDK Tiered VM (build 1.7.0-internal-betelgeuse_08_may_2007_21_32-b00, mixed mode)

Stay tuned for more packaging updates on Gentoo.

OpenJDK ebuild

betelgeuse@pena ~ $ eselect java-vm list
Available Java Virtual Machines:
  [1]   blackdown-jdk-1.4.2
  [2]   ibm-jdk-bin-1.5
  [3]   kaffe
  [4]   openjdk-1.7  user-vm
  [5]   sun-jdk-1.4
  [6]   sun-jdk-1.5
  [7]   sun-jdk-1.6  system-vm
  [8]   sun-jdk-1.6.0.02
  [9]   sun-jdk-1.7

http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/java-experimental/dev-java/openjdk/openjdk-1.7.0.0_alpha12.ebuild

Takes me about 45 minutes to build on:

betelgeuse@pena ~ $ uname -p
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz

Please note the word experimental in the url. Now I am off to bed for today. Have an exam in C programming coming up tomorrow.

Updating Bluetooth packages

For quite a while now the bluez packages on Gentoo haven’t been maintained so we have been stuck in 2.25. I decided to fix this so I bumped bluez-libs and bluez-utils to 3.10. You need to run revdep-rebuild –library libbluetooth.so.1 as upstream decided to increase the .so number to 2. Also worth nothing is that they have changed the way pins are asked from the user to a DBUS based API. If you have security set to user in hcid.conf you most likely want to install an applet that asks the PIN from you. There is now net-wireless/bluez-gnome for GNOME users and >=net-wireless/kdebluetooth-1.0_beta2 for KDE users.
The bug reports this fixed are
bluez-libs and bluez-utils:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143154
bluez-gnome:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173013
A couple of new ones were opened against the new version too so there is still some work before it is ready for stable. Hopefully I just need to proxy maintain the packages for a user.

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