[java-gnome-hackers] free software; Debian packages

[Mark H. <mh...@ti...>]

Hi,
  I've been working on Debian packages for java-gnome. I've been trying
to keep this in the main Debian section but have been having trouble:

* Ant is in contrib -> I've made makefile replacements

* A number of packages rely on sun.awt. AFAIK, this is not implemented
in any of the free java implementations (gcj doesn't seem to work).
please correct me if I'm wrong.
The affected classes are:
gdk/WindowAttr.java
gdk/Drawable.java
gdk/Gdk.java
gtk/ToolBar.java

How difficult would it be to change these so that they don't use awt?
(possibly create replacements for the awt classes)

I think one of the main reasons many people would choose java-gnome over
swing is that it is truly free software, hence these changes are
important. If java-gnome can't be compiled with one of the free
compilers, then it wouldn't be classed as Free software in Debian terms,
would not be allowed into the main archive and hence would not appear on
official DVDs or CDs. Furthermore, it would not be able to take
advantage of the build daemons, which try to create and test packages on
15 (I think) architecture/OS combinations. Also, packages using
java-gnome would not be allowed into the main distribution.
--=20

+----------------------------------------------+
| Mark Howard               cam.ac.uk   mh344@ |
| http://www.tildemh.com    tildemh.com    mh@ |
+----------------------------------------------+