Frank,

[Hope you don't mind me cc'ing current-users, but this may be of
general interest]

> I heard that quick.com.au crashed, which explains why I could not
> reach it. I hope it can be recovered.

Yes, its back - in a nice new case.  Filesystem damage was restricted
to NetBSD/current - which was easily fixed by checking it out again
:-)

> Anyway, I believe you did the NetBSD port of JDK. The last version
> you did is 1.1.6, I think. 1.2 has been out for a bit now, and
> more and more people are using it. The obvious question is: do you
> plan to do 1.2 soon?

Actually I started on 1.2 quite a while ago.  I also have 1.1.8 but
have not had a chance to unpack it yet.

As for 1.2, it is much cleaner than 1.1.x so I decided to start from
scratch and make only the changes that were needed for NetBSD.  I've
done most? of what is needed to attempt a build, but got a bit stuck on
the context stuff - 1.1.x just uses setjmp etc, 1.2 seems to use that
as well as some svr4 {get,set} context stuff, I was still trying to
sort out the significance of that when the new license came out for
1.2.x

The new license for 1.2.x makes it impossible for us to do a port and
make it freely available.  We could make patches available - but then
every NetBSD site that wanted to use JDK 1.2.x would need to sign the
Sun license - thus excluding themselves from working on kaffe and the
like.

As I understand it, we could still do a jdk 1.2.x port but would need
to fork out money for the test suite and need to pay royalties for
each copy given away - not really viable :-) Linux are apparently
exempt from this restriction.

All in all I didn't see much point persisting with a 1.2 port if it
was going to be a dead end.  This is a real pain as I had _lots_ of
things I wanted to work on that needed 1.2.

Perhaps we need to lobby Sun to grant NetBSD the same breaks as Linux
since after all we are the ones that support all their old gear :-)

I'm changing jobs next week and will be moving to the SF Bay Area
later this year - this may give me some more time to work on JDK ports
- I'd like to at least do 1.1.8/i386 and sparc.  Though the opposite
may end up happening :-)

--sjg