Yet another day of staying up late last night and getting up early to work on Jikes RVM. We're prepping for the 2.3.2 release. I'd like 2.3.2 to come out able to make optimizing builds using entirely free tools, not just able to make images that use the baseline compiler.
There's a bug in how the InstructionFormats.RAW file is generated when we host the build under Kaffe OpenVM. Only a few characters are different out of over 840KB. But that's enough to break optimizing builds.
In a fond hope of resolving the problem, I started to make builds using gcj and gij. Well, I just made gij 3.3.3 die with a segmentation fault; this time while building the BootImageWriter. I suppose it's comforting to know that Jikes RVM isn't the only system with issues. I can see, though, why most people who aren't ideologically committed to free software probably use the Sun JDK or a Sun-derived one (Blackdown's or IBM's).
I was interested to read about the Monotone distributed version control system in tromey's diary entry posted on Planet Classpath. It would have been nice to have had something like Monotone when the Jikes RVM CVS server went down earlier this month. I wouldn't want to trust our repository to it as the primary technology (CVS is far older and more stable) but I wonder whether we couldn't easily put together some sort of unidirectional CVS => Monotone gateway . The other direction would be difficult, of course, since CVS doesn't have Monotone's features.