[Rxtx] JNA alternative (was: rxtx moving from JNI to JNA (was Re: About JRE crashes))

[Steffen DETTMER]

* Lucio Crusca wrote on Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 23:14 +0200:
> August 17 2010 16:55:36, Steffen DETTMER wrote:
> > just because of
> > personal perferences - which do not matter for rxtx users,
> > because it can be considered an implementation detail).
> 
> I agree that users don't really care about how things work, but
> only until they are forced to understand them in order to have
> a patch applied.
> 
> Personally I like the JNA idea, but there is at least one other
> less intrusive solution to the problem, that is to stay with
> JNI and to provide unofficial, unsupported, nightly (or
> weekly/monthly) cvs snapshot builds that include all the
> somewhat tested patches so far. That way users can try one of
> the snapshot builds instead of building from source themselves.

But to test and patch the platform-specific code, be it in Java
JNA or C JNI, they need to use such a platform.
How many of the JNA users would have access to Ultrix Exotic
2001? Or would they assume their linux patch would also work on
Slowlaris?

> Let me know what you think about my proposal. Since in the
> current situation I'm forced to set up a build environment for
> linux only to test the patch attached to bug 144 on linux, 

Yes, building the native part surely could be improved, and I'm
afraid that setting up linux build system is easy in compare with
HPUX or whatever...

I think this is what makes native code changes so `slow': the big
building and testing effort.
Experiences from automake list suggest that portable code not
tested on different platform becomes `automatically' unportable
by time... :-)

oki,

Steffen


 
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