Re: 1.1.7 final(?) tarballs available

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 20:04:02 -0500, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:
 >
 > I am afraid there's not much we can do to "just fix it".  Swing and AWT
 > are under heavy development and the developers use the latest versions
 > of GTK, thus they probably sometimes rely on some features available
 > in newever versions only.

I understand that. I am trying to advocate for developers *not* 
automatically using the latest libraries, and taking into consideration 
what their target users are using. I believe this practice 
(automatically using the latest libraries, without careful 
consideration) is very widespread. It results in hindering open source 
adoption among people that may just be trying out various open source 
stuff, and have no simple way of updating to a latest version of 
whatever. There are others that simply can't update, even if they knew how.

For example, the Fortune 5000 company I mentioned in my previous email, 
simply can't upgrade hundreds of users to SuSE 9.2 or Debian unstable, 
or Gentoo. If this company wanted to switch to SableVM instead of Sun's 
JRE, they could not. So this hinders adoption of SableVM and Classpath 
among companies and users that might want to try an open source VM.

This makes SableVM and Classpath look as a geek toy to most people, with 
no immediate impact on their world (except for the significant research 
value, which I'm not trying to diminish.)

Now, if SableVM and Classpath are just research projects, and you have 
no interest in becoming the de facto open source VM and open source Java 
API, then go on you merry way and don't think of the users you could 
reach if you thought a little bit more about library choices.

We will have no choice but to use Kaffe. ( Just teasing! :-)

 > What we could do, is try to work it around.  I don't know how mych of
 > gtk-2.4 is actually being used.  You can change the pkg-config check
 > in configure to check for gtk 2.2 and see what other problems arise.
 >
 > We might be able to work around these bits that depend on 2.4 and
 > document how to build sablevm-classpath with gtk < 2.4.

I'll work on that early this week (say, by Wednesday?), and mention what 
I find here. I will also make an entry in the wiki once I find a workaround.

Thanks for the prompt replies, guys, even if they were in the negative.

PJ Cabrera