[tcljava-dev] proposal of patches for tclblend

[Fabrice D. <fab...@gm...>]

Dear Tcl/Java team members,

having a personal interest in the Tcl/Java project (that I am a relative
newcomer with), I started to play with it a little bit. In my
understanding, the last public release (1.4.1) dates back to 2008
(reference: http://tcljava.sourceforge.net/docs/website/index.html ).

Needless to say that since that time, the JDK and Tcl have evolved quite a
bit. The Tclblend-1.4.1 package can't be built anymore with newest JDK and
Tcl for several reasons:

- starting with the JDK 10, the javah generator for JNI header files
(deprecated since JDK 8 AFAIK) was removed, replaced with an -h option in
javac. However the interface is different, since javah applied to .class
files while javac processes only .java files.
Some Tclblend configuration scripts (specifically tclblend.m4, configure.in,
Makefile.in and jtclsh.in) need being updated in order to compile with JDK
10+.
Without patches, Tclblend simply fails to build due to the missing javah
tool.

- in recent versions of Tcl (8.5 and 8.6), direct access to interp->result
(among other things) is now forbidden. It is therefore not possible anymore
to build tclblend without patching it.

After some hours of experimentation and a few patches in order to fix
warnings and errors, I managed to build TclBlend and test successfully
jtclsh on the following platforms:
- Linux Mint with JDK 9 + Tcl 8.6.9
- MacOSX 10.14.4 with JDK 10 and 12 + Tcl 8.6.9 (adding support to OSX
platforms was not too difficult, but it seems to have never been done
before)
- I would like to test on a Windows platform but only when all the problems
on Unix-like platforms will have been addressed (there are many)

As far as I know, my patches should be backward compatible, though I didn't
have the possibility to test with old JDK and old Tcl.

Is anyone interested by the patches? At the moment, it is still
experimental and many warnings are still issued by the compilers (javac and
gcc) during Tclblend build (the warnings concern non patched parts of
code). In case of a positive answer, can anyone help me with the best way
of exchange? (I am a newcomer in SourceForge as a contributor therefore
please forgive my naive questions) Does Mo (or anyone else in the staff
list) still manage the project? Is there a git or subversion repo to which
to submit the patches (otherwise I can set up one). Anyway, I would like to
avoid CVS nowadays, and I would fork only as a last resort (e.g. if I have
no answer within a couple of months).

Best regards

Fabrice Ducos