Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 14:01:05 -0600 (MDT) From: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> To: "Brian J. Sletten" <brian@parabon.com> Cc: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>, "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com>, "'Greg Lewis'" <glewis@trc.adelaide.edu.au>, freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: JCK License implications (was: State of Server-Side Java) Message-ID: <200008202001.OAA09273@nomad.yogotech.com> In-Reply-To: <39A013CA.30C622B6@parabon.com> References: <59063B5B4D98D311BC0D0001FA7E4522026D77CF@l04.research.kpn.com> <200008201542.JAA08667@nomad.yogotech.com> <39A013CA.30C622B6@parabon.com>
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[ This is not intended for Brian, but is intended more as a guideline for anyone wanting to get involved. ] > > If they can't do anything with the existing resources, how can it be > > expected that they'll do something more if more resources are spent on > > them, slowing down the folks who *are* doing something? > > I have volunteered numerous times with the caveats that I don't want > to duplicate effort and have looked for some kind of organization to > direct my efforts. I have largely been ignored. The patches are what there is. That is (from a technical point of view) what there is. In a volunteer organization, leadership is done from without, not from within. (Actually, in almost all organizations it's done that way, but sometimes managements sets direction. There is no management per-se in a volunteer organization.) > What exactly do you expect from those of us willing to help but not > exactly sure where to start? You know as much as the next guy as to what there is to do. Take for example the recent pthreads work. Someone found a need and filled it. It wasn't asked or expected of them to fill it. If it were *me* with free time and something to do, I would do the following. - Build my own binary copy of the JDK. - Do something with it until it breaks. - Note it's broken to the mailing list. - Try to find what's broken, and fix it. - Send fixes to the list. - Repeat from the top. > Is there any organization or do we just individually hack until it > passes the JCK? To be honest, it may pass the JCK, but still have tons of bugs in it. The JCK doesn't guarantee it doesn't have bugs, it just guarantees that it doesn't 'violate' the Java specification. So, as far as JCK goes, I don't think there's much that can be done at this point, since no-one knows how close or how far away from JCK compliance we are. My suspicion, based on nothing but a gut feeling is that we are very close (and might be able to) pass the JCK *today*. But, that doesn't mean that the JDK is bug-free, or even highly usable. There's still tons to do, bugs to fix, etc.. Trying to organize a group of folks (especially programmers) is *more* work than doing it yourself. Given that I don't have enough time to do more than I'm doing already, I don't have time to help you find something for you to do. This is the way FreeBSD has been from the very beginning (~6 years ago). People find something that needs done, and do it. Every one of the people on the FreeBSD development team has found 'something that needed to be done', and went off and did it. At times, they needed to be organized when there were conflicts, but technical conflicts are a rare occurance when you consider the # of hours spent on the project. So, feel free to duplicate efforts. It'll be really hard to spend alot of time duplicating effort when the goal is to minimize such duplicated efforts, but it does happen. Heck, alot of Greg's early patchkits contained some duplicated efforts that the porting team had already done, but it didn't make *that* much difference in the end. I actually *encourage* duplicated efforts, since often-times it reveals somethign that might otherwise not shown up. The fixes that eventually result are often better than what the inviduals accmplish on their own. In summary, find something that needs to be done. Native threads, porting Hot Spot, fixing bugs, working on vendors, whining at Sun, writing Java code and testing it against the existing engine, whatever. There is *plenty* to be done, and if you can't figure out what to do, find something else that you're more comfortable with that seems like fun and jump in on it. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message
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