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Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:01:17 +0100
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To: Jakarta Commons Developers List <commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: Re: Initial impressions.
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 <31cc37360702061543r3804bea3ub62163ad9a941264@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi,

Henri Yandell schrieb:
> On 2/6/07, Nelson Carpentier <nelz9999@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello Everybody!
>>
>> Hopefully, this is more constructive than whiney.  I thought I'd share
>> my initial impressions with you about trying to contribute...
> 
> Even whining can be good once we've got over the natural defensiveness :)
> 
>> I recently got an inkling to add a cool bit of functionality to the
>> EqualsBuilder in the Commons-Lang project.
>>
>> I went through the documentation and stuff, figured out some of the
>> style guidelines and other bits, then went ahead and did a "svn co" of
>> the code I wanted to help with...
> 
> Main style guideline for any source is to adhere to the apparent style
> of the source you're changing. And not to let the IDE reformat things
> in your patches/commits (just spent a while dealing with a 1200 line
> patch that was really only 200 lines... grrr).
> 
>> I started up a project in Eclipse and though there were errors showing
>> up everywhere, I was able to get to the code I wanted to change.  I
>> started modifying a bit of the code, and only tried to tackle all the
>> errors popping up when I wanted to compile my code and write some
>> tests against it...
> 
> Odd that there were errors. Lang's a very simple project in that the
> only dependency it has is JUnit and the only source trees you'll need
> to hook up are src/java and src/test. There will be lots of style
> warnings in Eclipse though.
> 
>> That's when I figured out I was having a JDK versioning problem.  I
> 
> Ah, and a bunch of warnings about 'enum'. And probably some deprecated 
> bits.
> 
>> was on a Mac (to which I am fairly new), and everything was running
> 
> I'm on a Mac too.
> 
>> the default of JDK 1.5.  I looked at some more of the documentation
>> and found that the JAR should be built with JDK 1.2.  I figured out
>> how to jump back to JDK 1.4.2 on the Mac, and maybe even to the JDK
>> 1.3.X...  But no JDK 1.2.
> 
> There is no 1.2 on the Mac, and getting it on Linux is a pain in the
> arse (apparantly it was poorly coded and used illegal APIs), so your
> choices are to use Windows, use an old Linux install or use a glibc
> patch on Linux. Oh - or use Solaris I presume.
> 
> Macs went from 1.1.x on OS 9 to 1.3.x on OS X.
> 
> For the last Lang release I pointed this out and we've moved the JVM
> on which we build from 1.2 to 1.3.
> 
>> While on JDK 1.4.2, a lot of things seem to resolve themselves, but
>> there are some packages I cannot fix, because they use "enum" which is
>> a reserved word in later JDK's.  I haven't yet checked this in JDK
>> 1.3.X, but I figured "Hey, why not go back to the recommended JDK
>> 1.2?"
> 
> The enum stuff is just a warning. Or should be. Are you sure these are
> errors and not just lots of warnings? I usually use the command line
> for developing Lang, but I go to Eclipse quite often to do the more in
> depth debugging.
> 
>> So, I went straight to http://java.sun.com.  There in my initial
>> research, I found out that they really aren't keen on even giving out
>> the 1.2 JDK, and there was even a big ol' warning that 1.3.X was soon
>> to be EOL'd (End-of-life'd.).  (Nevermind the fact that I am not sure
>> I even COULD get 1.2 installed on my Mac even if I found it...)
> 
> Once Lang 2.3 is out, I want to start thinking about 3.0 and
> suggesting the shocking idea of moving the support up to 1.5+.
> 

Although moving forward is good most of the times. Such central 
components like lang should stay behind the current JVM release as long 
as possible IMHO because other project who are depended on it might not 
always upgrade to the latest and greatest JVM-Release immediately.

I think it is better for these projects to stay at same JVM for a long 
time and than make a bigger step as proposed by you here. One more thing 
people might take into consideration (I don't know if applies here) is 
that java programs are not always running desktop JVMs but also ones for 
embedded devices, ... and not all classes are available everywhere!

Tom

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