Re: [Java-gnome-developer] Making native binaries

[Thomas P. <per...@ao...>]

Am Montag, den 25.10.2004, 16:31 -0400 schrieb Andrew Cowie:
> One objective is to make a native linux binary out of Java code. That's
> what GCJ is good for, assuming your code works with the limited subset
> of Java that the GNU team have managed to write.

I'll guess it works if it runs? Anyway, is there a straightforward
method of compiling a java-gnome application with gcj? I found this
working somehow:

gcj --
classpath=/usr/share/java/gtk2.4.jar:/usr/share/java/libgcj-3.3.4.jar -
lgtkjava2.4 -lgtkjar2.4 --main=gFunkyMD gFunkyMD.java recordFiles.java -
o gFunkyMD

Is this the right way of doing it? The problem is that the gcj-compiled
binary crashes when the class files with jvm don't crash - I could send
the code of the faulty part if you want?

Anyway, is there some way of doing the gcj compile thing "right" with
java-gnome? Or is it okay as I do it above?

> Anyone using a "modern" Linux distribution will find it has a packaging
> system that is able to automatically fetch (and build, if necessary) all
> the dependencies necessary. Since you raised the question, I assume you
> are using a Linux distro without these capabilities, which makes your
> request understandable, though I would suggest misguided.

Fyi, I use Slackware. Although no dependency-checking in the packaging
system, there are tools out there for it which do. I care about which
packages are on my system, and want to keep that count as small as
possible (in terms of "what I don't need I don't want on my disk"). Just
being a "modern" distro doesn't automatically mean being a good distro.
When I think of the SuSE machines at our school, they are as crappy as
those Windows machines, in terms of "knowing what's going on inside".
(No flame war intended.)

I thought instead of insisting that users download that dependency, I
could just accept the small overhead of the binary and .. nah, you're
probably right that I'd have to do a package for java-gnome and give
this away with my app ;)

> [Indeed, that's the whole point of a dependency based packaging system -
> that it takes care of expressing and resolving such things for you
> *especially keeping track of dependencies between libraries*, which is
> why I observed that this was likely a misguided effort as you're well on
> your way to circumventing (and thus duplicating) all the work that the
> distribution people do packaging libraries in the first place]

I'll probably do a java-gnome package now, as I've said.

> I'm certain it would work well for you if you statically linked in the
> entire GTK library stack right down to libxml2, but that's on the order
> of 60 packages. Would be a rather big binary.

Just for the sake of trying out - how would I do this, command-wise?

> Otherwise, there's bound to be a disconnect somewhere. 

I still wonder how these binary-only GTK apps work on my system without
knowing what GTK version I'm using (RealPlayer 10 comes to my mind)?

> ALL THIS SAID, the eclipse team obviously manage to ship binaries which
> are linked against, among other things, a generic gtk API, so its
> obviously do-able. I would suggest you look there for details.

Can you please give more information on this? Do you mean I could
develop GTK applications with eclipse with ease?


Thanks for your time,
Thomas