It's been mostly cleanups, bug-fixing and documentation work. Lately I was busy with a lot of merges from JanosVM, who have released a 1.0 release in the mean time. JanosVM is probably the first publicly available Java VM that implements process separation (coming into Sun's JDK 1.5). And it's Free software.

The Cygwin woes continue. I tracked down the bug to some stack corruption issue in a jar handling function. I decided to 'ask someone who knows' and post a bug report to their mailing list. I went through Cygwin's bug reporting page, ran kaffe in Cygwin's (very crash prone) gdb, copied pages of gdb output to support my claim that it's a compiler bug, and waited.

Of course nothing happened. When after a week I somewhat trollishly asked if gcc2 was maintained at all under Cygwin, I got mildly flamed for assuming the bug is in the compiler and not in my code. The poster had apparently not bothered to look through my mail beside the 'I think this is a bug in gcc2 on i386-cygwin' and 'it works on i386-linux'. And I got told to install gcc2. The funny thing is that my original bug report, in order to conform to the Cygwin bug posting rules, had a longish attachment listing gcc2 as installed. And I was using gcc2 all the way, and stated that explicitly as well.

Lessons learned: when you try to get someone to look your way, and you're on a high volume mailing list, you should try to sound like a troll. Then you'll get some attention. If you follow the rules, noone will bother replying. Never submit all information on a bug at once, give it away pice by piece, to make it more interesting for your audience. That'll keep them hooked and motivated to solve your problem.

I'm not interested enough in getting kaffe to run on Cygwin to play attention grabbing games with busy Cygwin developers. I don't blame them: they are getting an enormous amount of mail every day. So did I, until I unsubscribed from the Cygwin mailing list today.

For me, it's interesting to compare how both Kaffe and Cygwin try to use the mailing lists as their bug database. It works somewhat for Kaffe, because the volume is rather small (a few hundred KB per month), so the issues get resolved rather quickly. But, as my Cygwin experience showed me, it's not a good substitute for a bug database when the volume goes up. Then you need some way to sepearate the trash talk from the more productive communication, i.e. a bug database.