Inching closer to a better "open source"/"free" java using Apache Gump
Q: What is Apache Gump?
A: Apache Gump is a continuous integration tool, famous for building most of Apache's java-based projects and their dependencies (which constitutes several million lines of code split up into hundreds of projects)
Q: How can Gump help improve Open Source Java offerings?
A: Gump can use any JVM, on brutus we use JDK1.4.x, JDK 1.5.x and Kaffe. If we can compare the output of JDK1.4.x and Kaffe and see if they are comparable. We can say that Kaffe is as good as JDK1.4.x.
Q: How can Gump help Kaffe?
A: We can set up a cron job to get CVS HEAD of Kaffe, build Kaffe on brutus and THEN make gump use THAT new Kaffe instance, we can continuously check Kaffe's effectiveness and find bugs early.
A: We've built Kaffe from CVS HEAD and the results of the latest gump run using Kaffe is at http://brutus.apache.org/gump/kaffe/
Comments
While I strongly admire the effort, the pain going into the process is high. We've got past ant bootstrapping, and now it looks like xerces' build file is the problem. This is going to take time.
Posted by: Steve Loughran | December 1, 2004 10:07 AM
Hopefully this fix - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gump&m=110187283402978&w=2 will take it further.
Posted by: Davanum Srinivas | December 1, 2004 10:10 AM
Heya,
thanks a lot to Apaches for helping along and kicking free java runtimes into shape. While Kaffe is far from being perfect, it's a start.
In the long run, Gump will make sure that Kaffe & other GNU Classpath using runtimes work nicely out of the box with most of the free & open source software written in Java, and that's a killer feature :)
cheers,
dalibor topic
Posted by: Dalibor Topic | December 1, 2004 11:16 AM