Older blog entries for tromey (starting at number 6)

Another couple weeks spent on gcc 3.1. Luckily, this is going to end soon. Today I worked on what I think is the last critical gcj bug for this release.

We have a bit of a problem in gcj, which is that only two people (Alex and Per) are familiar with the front end, and only Alex is really familiar with certain parts. They're both apparently pretty busy with non-gcj stuff, which means that compiler problems go unfixed, patches go unreviewed, etc. Somebody needs to step up here. Maybe me.

I've been looking at Gnome again a bit. Today for fun I wrote a little gnome-session patch. It's pretty silly. I've also been looking at GStreamer, which looks quite nice. The documentation is pretty good overall, but there are still some important missing pieces.

I've been working on gcj 3.1 pretty much full time. Don't these entries get boring?

One thing I've noticed is that saying the words "upcoming release" acts much like chumming for sharks. Suddenly all these bugs I've never heard of appear, and suddenly lots of platforms that ordinarily never see patches start getting three or four a day. Keeping up with this is taxing.

It makes me wonder if there isn't something better we can do. Currently I'm leaning towards just incremental improvements: writing more tests, more documentation, having nightly regressions on more platforms. These things would at least let us know when we broke something that used to work.

Today I took a break from gcj 3.1 release work and replied to some Automake email. I also did some AWT hacking; most of the TestAWT application works with gcj now. The hardest thing is finding relatively simple AWT applications so I can test it.

I've been continuing to work on gcj 3.1. Things are coming along nicely. This is going to be an excellent release for us.

Last night I also did a little bit of work on Automake. We'll release 1.6.1, a bug-fix release, as soon as we fix the major bugs found in 1.6.

Today I read the guest essay on linuxandmain.com by Shawn Gordon. He argues against using the GPL. Now, he might have a good reason, but his examples and other supporting arguments really aren't very good. I'm not linking to it since really it isn't worth reading -- it isn't a serious essay.

Last night I gave a talk on autoconf, automake, and libtool at the local LUG. It went pretty well, I think, especially given how nervous I was at the start.

Lately I've been working on getting gcj 3.1 ready for release. You can see the status.

The gcc 3.1 release is coming up soon, and gcj isn't quite ready. I spent today making a list of release-critical bugs. I fixed a couple of the problems. 3.1 is going to be the best gcj release yet: we have much better library coverage (still no AWT -- probably 3.2), better performance, and the interpreter works on more platforms.

Today I hacked on the Classpath Gtk+ AWT peers. AWT is the biggest missing piece of libgcj, and I'm pretty interested in having it all work.

I also spent a little time looking at my Emacs TAGS patch. This patch changes the TAGS file format a little so that the command line used to create an entry is recorded. It also adds some code to etags.el so that when you save a buffer, the TAGS file is automatically updated. No more make tags.

Finally I worked on my automake slide show a little. I'm giving a talk at the LUG this week and I need some sort of visual outline.