Name: jl125535 Date: 07/14/2004


A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
The current JDK build process is non-trivial and could use a lot of work cleaning up dependency and compiler error problems.

The first problem is the source-code dependency on a commercial tool called MKS Toolkit. This dependency should be removed as soon as possible as it is a major hinderance for developers to build the source. While it is true an evaluation version of MKS Toolkit is available, the authors are quite reluctant to give these out solely for the purpose of building the JDK code. Often evaluation versions for this purpose will be refused. Ideally, the JDK build should make use of cygwin or an equivilent package instead of MKS Toolkit.

Secondly, some of the JDK dependencies are difficult if not impossible to acquire. For example, the JDK requires DirectX SDK 7.0 which is no longer publically available online. The build process should be updated to accept DirectX SDK 9.0 which is the latest release.

Thirdly, the source-code depends on Visual C++ 6.0 instead of Visual C++ .NET. While argueably the two compilers are similar, the latter compiler is *far* more ANSI C++ compliant and generates more optimized code. This could only benefit everyone. Sun should make sure the JVM source-code is 100% ANSI C++ compliant and uses headers such as "iostream" instead of "iostream.h"

Fourthy, Sun should dedicate a discussion forum to the purpose of download and building the JDK from source-code. There has been a strong push by the community as of late to "open-source" the JDK. At the very least, users expect to be able to build the JDK from the source-code, otherwise bugs are very difficult to track down and debug.

JUSTIFICATION :
Users with strong interest in open-sourcing JDK would be appeased by steps toward this goal, notably increasing the availability of the source-code and aiding in its building.

Users submitting patches to JVM bugs can only aid Sun's limited engineering resources. Building the source-code is the first step.
(Incident Review ID: 285667)
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