12 Apr 2002 sab39   » (Master)

Nothing

Nothing much of note has happened with regard to free software, which is why I haven't posted any diary entries despite having advodiary to make it painless. Of course, "nothing to do with free software" doesn't mean nothing at all. I've been busy painting and assembling furniture for the baby's room, and with my "real" job. I'm not sure how appropriate that kind of discussion is for this forum; I know that I don't mind seeing it in other people's diaries, but I do tend to just skim over it. But it's more important to my life than japitools is, so I guess posting a little bit about it even though it's technically offtopic is okay.

japitools

I've been working mostly on revamping the first pass of japitools, which is the Japize java program. I've revamped the algorithms for iterating over the classes to ensure that the output is sorted in strict alphabetical order with an exception for java.lang.Object. I also rethought the commandline options and added the capability for Japize to dump it's output directly into a .gz file by using Java's GZIPOutputStream class. Finally, I wrote a perl wrapper called japize to (a) allow running the program as japize rather than as "java net.wuffies.japi.Japize", and (b) check the program's arguments for invalid syntax early, so that you don't have to wait for a JVM to start up just to get told that you misspelled "packages".

In the process I discovered a few issues in the jode.bytecode library that Japize relies on for loading classes from zipfiles. I mailed the Jode author about them, and it turns out that the latest Jode in CVS already solves all my problems. Although this code hasn't been publically released yet, I think I'll definitely be using it once it is: it will allow me to vastly simplify several places where I'm currently fighting against the Jode API rather than working with it.

japitools - mind-numbing details

I just need to make a few more tweaks to Japize, and then it will be time to move on to pass 2: the japicompat perl script that tests APIs for compatibility with each other. Aside from making this use a constant and bounded amount of memory (instead of O(size-of-the-JDK-measured-in-methods), which is pretty huge and growing exponentially every release, it seems) I want to add some more options, like comparing bidirectionally instead of unidirectionally, more generalized filtering of the output, and machine-readable error output instead of human-readable. This last change is in order to support the new planned third pass - japifilter.

japifilter will perform the part of the japicompat process that couldn't be done as part of the second pass without using O(N) memory, optionally translate the errors to humanly-readable, and add new options like the ability to exclude errors that appear in another file. That will enable me to say "Show all errors between kaffe and jdk1.1 except for those that also appear between jdk1.2 and jdk1.1" - so I can evaluate kaffe's progress to full 1.1 compatibility without false positives for parts of kaffe that are already jdk1.2 compatible instead.

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