I didn't get much done this time. I tracked down something that looks like a bug in our jaxp sources. Bug report and a triaging fix are on GNU JAXP mailing list.
In other news, I managed to break the nightly builds with a change of a prototype for swab. I need to figure out why configure doesn't pick up the declaration from the headers.
The Cygwin problems persist. GNU gdb crashed under Cygwin a couple of times while trying to debug the problem, so it was not really useful. Now I'm reverting to the old and tried method of using kaffe's own debugging facility -vmdebug. And I've compiled kaffe in interpreter mode, so I can trace each bytecode as it gets executed. That should be enough to trace the bug to its origin. When in doubt, log everything.
My MingW porting adventures are postponed, as I had to reinstall Windows on my notebook. I took the chance to put Qnx 6.2 on it as well, so I might get a chance to fix the Qnx port one day.
I think one of the main reasons why there is apparently more interest in Mono than in gcj is Miguel. He's been doing a lot of work to promote the project. And he is a really funny guy. On a mission. The strong oppposition he was facing in the initial stage helped get the Mono name out to people.
On the other hand, free java implementations suffer from a lack of good publicity anyway. Most java developers are developing on/for Sun's implementation, and are able to use it on their platforms for free. Most people developing for Sun's platform means that a lot of java code out there is not really portable accross implementations. It often depends on some "misfeatures" of Sun's implementation, or on parts for which no free implementations exist, like Swing.
That situation casts a bad light on free implementations. Just search google groups for kaffe and LimeWire to see what I mean. Most java on linux FAQs recommend going with Sun's implementation, and deinstalling whatever free implementation is there. That's a hurdle Mono doesn't have to face in order to attract attention.
The second part is even more important: there is already a good enough "free as in beer" implementation for most people, provided by Sun. Microsoft's .NET tools won't work on Linux as far as I know, so Mono doesn't have to fight against good, free beer competition on that platform. With Java, the situation is very different: Sun's and IBM's JVM are quite good, their class libraries implement the whole API, and they work on most linux distributions, as well as some BSDs, as far as I know.
It is a much tougher market for eyeballs gcj and other free java implementations are in, compared to Mono. I think that will start to change in a couple of years when/if free implementations start to prove superior to non-free ones. I believe that's going to happen one day, just like gcc is now the compiler of choice for a lot of platforms. It takes a lot of effort to get there, though, and gcj, kaffe, classpath etc. need a lot of help.