> Some preliminary discussion at the last hackathon produced the > opinion that even Java ports should be built from source by all > means.
That is the root of this debate - "built from source by all means". We don't have this now in the ports tree so please don't selectively apply this rule to java ports. There is a point at which building from source does not make sense or the benefits don't outweigh the effort to make it happen. While it has been pointed out that java ports can be built on fast architectures and shared with the slower archs. The realities of how java applications are built are being ignored. It is common practice for a project to include components in full from other projects by way of incorporating jar files. Let's expore this phenomena with just Eclipse and Tomcat. We build Eclipse from source, but a closer look at what you get from the source distfile reveals that a full copy of tomcat binaries (jar files) is included along with ant, junit, lucene and more. The included versions of tomcat and junit don't match our ports of these. Should we take the time to hack out these included components and force them to be built from source or to use our ports versions? What exactly do we gain by that and who is going to the work and maintain it? Continuing the analysis with Tomcat we will see that things are sightly different here but a PITA for other reasons. Let's ignore for a moment any included jar files and take a look at the release notes for the three versions of Tomcat we have. There you will find an assortment of common dependencies with different version requirements. So shall we make multiple ports of these dependencies just so that we can produce the same byte-code all over again? Oh yea and who is volunteering do all that useless busy work? I think it is time that we accept reality of the common practices of how java software is made and adapt to it. Trying to force the common practices of how C applications are built on java applications does not make sense. A few years ago I took it upon myself to get java running on OpenBSD as well as other operating systems. Now that that goal is comming to fution must I and other java oriented developers jump through flaming hoops just to port java applications to OpenBSD? -Kurt
