[Sablevm-developer] Re: [Fwd: I would like to help]

[Grzegorz B. P. <ga...@de...>]

W li=B6cie z sob, 27-03-2004, godz. 11:23, Etienne Gagnon pisze:=20
> Based on what I saw at your website, I would like to begin with
> helping in porting the existing source code to cygwin. In this
> context, I would like to know who the contact point is, and
> what the current status is.

Hello Kamesh,

I am very happy to answer to your email. Cc:ing sablevm-developer
mailing list, as this is probably the best place to discuss
SableVM development-related topics.

Status of cygwin port:

* We have some code that once worked [1], and the changes in SableVM
sources were minimal

* We completly disabled signals usage in SableVM. As far as I know
Cygwin has some minimal support for signals, not sure how good, so maybe
we should just auto-disable signals when cygwin is detected?

* We had to compile shared library of libffi by hand as cygwin gcc
provided only static library, and, I think, we also had to copy
the headers, because they were not available from cygwin.
Fixing this problem and forwarding patches upstream (to Cygwin)
would be important part of the port because that would later allow other
people to "just compile" SableVM on cygwin, which is not possible now.

* We disabled GTK+/AWT in sablevm-classpath, because we did not have
recent-enough GTK+. It could have changed sice then. You need at least
2.2.x version, and it has to be shared library too.

* Under Cygwin a shared library can not open itself. libsablevm.so does
this, so we had to code a workaround. We store addresses of funtions
inside libsablevm.so and then we search them instead of asking libtool
to do this work for us. This code is already written, is working and all
it needs is merge with our development version called "staging".

On the "tools that you use". You need Subversion to access our code
repository (though You can also use last daily snapshot tar archive as
your starting point, see http://devel.sablevm.org/shot ). Subersion
nicely compiles under cygwin, but maybe you'd be able to find binary
packages (I was not, a few months ago). They would need to be quite
recent though. Windows version will not be good, because it'd use
dos-style CR/LF as line ends so most probably you would not even be able
to compile such a file under cygwin.

[1] The URL to the repository with cygwin port is this:
svn://svn.sablevm.org/developers/mlord/sandbox/sablevm-staging

You can use this command to see the changes from the original sablevm:
svn diff -r 1204:1272
svn://svn.sablevm.org/developers/mlord/sandbox/sablevm-staging |less

> Please let me know if there are any other tasks that I can
> lend a hand with.

We are surely interested in Cygwin port. Other that this - we are also
looking for somebody willing to prepare .rpm (or even lsb-rpm) packages
of SableVM (and then doing binary releases if possible)...

I guess you might have seen this page already:

	http://devel.sablevm.org/wiki/TODO

It contains a few suggested topics. It's all up to you :-)

Hope this helps,

				Grzegorz B. Prokopski

--=20
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <ga...@de...>
Debian GNU/Linux      http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPLed JVM  http://www.sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!?       http://devel.sablevm.org/wiki/WhySableVM