[Jikesrvm-core] Next Jikes RVM release

[Ian R. <ian...@ma...>]

Hi,

as I'm sure most people noticed, yesterday saw the release of Classpath
0.91:
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/announce/20060515.html

There have been a number of significant patches to the Jikes RVM, so I
was wondering if it was time to produce a new release? I have some
thoughts on what the new release should look like.

Essentials:

1) it should require Classpath 0.91. Currently VMClassLoader has some
conditional compilation to enable building with Classpath 0.90 and
earlier. If we state that the release requires Classpath 0.91 we avoid
this problem/mess. There's already a provisional requirement for
Classpath 0.90 in the NEWS file.

2) it should require Java 1.5.0+ for the bootstrap JVM. The Jikes RVM
and Classpath CVS heads won't compile for me on a 1.4.2 JVM due to
Classpath's URLClassLoader method signatures. Maybe there's another fix
for this, but it may be more work than it's worth.

Desirables:

1) a test for the mozilla development code. This is so that we can
specify "--disable-plugin" to Classpath's configure if the mozilla
development code appears not to be present (a common case). Possibly
this only effects Classpath's CVS head.

2) a fix for the Miranda method problem highlighted by Avery Moon.

3) better JAVA_HOME detection. Whilst I don't find the Jikes RVM hard to
configure, others have expressed difficulties. It seems a common problem
is editing the config files just to specify JAVA_HOME. It should be easy
to write a general purpose config file that searches common places to
set the JAVA_HOME variable. In a similar vain, possibly we could choose
sensible default config files when RVM_HOST/TARGET_CONFIG aren't set.

Questionables:

1) patching VM_TypeDescriptorParsing to allow it to recognize '-' as a
valid class name character. Jikes version 1.22 with the option "-target
1.5" will produce anonymous classes with "-" instead of "$" in its
names. This appears to be a bug in Jikes present only when specifying
1.5 as a target.

I hope in parallel to get the wiki and website style updated so that
it's ready for when the release is announced.

Regards,

Ian