Monday June 25, 2007 ![[Duke Thinking]](http://mediacast.sun.com/share/tmarble/Duke-Thinking.jpg)
| « November 2009 | ||||||
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
29 | 30 | |||||
| Today | ||||||
LINKS
CONTACT
Tom Marble's Weblog
template by
Helquin
Monday June 25, 2007
Debconf7
This past week I attended the eighth Debian Developers Conference (Debconf7)
in Edinburgh, Scotland. Debian is one of the Free Software distributions
which is very important for the success of the Sun's Java Stack (OpenJDK
and the rest of our Java portfolio including NetBeans and Glassfish).
In addition to myself Sun also had presence at Debconf7 from
Simon,
Martin, and
Barton.
Ironically I spent most of the first couple days catching up
with Andrew Haley of Fedora -- another essential Free Software distribution
for OpenJDK. Andrew and
Dalibor
came up for the first couple days of Debconf. I really appreciate
getting to see them again (it's been since FOSDEM). We discussed many
social and technical elements of OpenJDK and IcedTea that will
be important going forward. Among the many topics we discussed was
ways that we may be able to collaborate on open source Java for
all GNU/Linux distributions. I suspect that there may be some
interesting opportunities for collaboration since most of these
distributions share many of the same upstream libraries and applications.
I shared some of the tutorial that Petteri gave me recently
on how Gentoo handles Java runtimes, libraries and applications.
It has become clear that there are several layers of challenges
and opportunities. Even if we share knowledge of packaging
for GNU/Linux distributions we still need to have solutions
which work for OpenSolaris Indiana, Mac OS X, and even Windows.
As we've discussed before part of this solution will be
addressed by the Java Module System. Ideally Java modularity will
interoperate nicely with each OS' native packaging system.
The current lack of these standards has led to Java application
developers falling into the habit of including all dependent
libraries as part of their application installers. Of course
to work best with operating systems with modern packaging systems
each of these libraries needs to be refactored into independent
packages. And we need to resist the temptation to have multiple
library (ABI) versions proliferate. The very good news, however, is
that as we encourage "upstreams" to adopt the open source
"refactored on mutually independent packages" approach I am confident
that out of the box (OOB) experience for Java application users
will be substantially better.
Simon and I gave the "State of the Coffee Cup" presentation which gave a high level overview of the history of OpenJDK and roadmap for upcoming developments. We were fortunate to have cameo appearances by Dalibor (one of the outside IGB members) and Andrew (principal developer for IcedTea). You can download the video of our presentation (eventually the high-res version should get posted as well). Our talk was extremely well received and many developers are interested in getting OpenJDK into Debian "main" (woot!). I was especially pleased to hear from a couple developers that are currently deploying Sun Java (under the DLJ) to thousands of servers in grid deployments. This is one of the use cases we designed in packaging Sun Java for Debian last year and highlights one of the strengths of debconf (in this context I mean the Debian configuration tool).
Not surprisingly I had many requests for porting OpenJDK to new platforms. Of course Wookey (Embedded Debian) is keen to see the new ARM EABI port. Several mentioned PPC. We already know of great interest in SPARC. I am hopeful that we can facilitate the process of new ports soon.
One of the great things about meeting people at conferences like this is sometimes you get to meet not only friends from IRC but co-workers as well. I was really happy to meet Sun's own Martin Man and very impressed by his talk on Nexenta (Martin do you have the slides/screen capture posted anywhere?). Later that evening, after the keysigning party, one of the people I've meet on IRC -- Desmond -- who happens to be a Computer Science student graduating tomorrow from the University of Edinburgh went out to do a very personalized pub crawl. And yes, the beer is awesome!
Wednesday was the "Day Trip" to the Isle of Bute. This was great for the fantastic scenery (see my pix from Debconf7 and the Day Trip). In a continuing example of why attending these conferences is great I got to spend some time discussing the future of Xorg with Debian's maintainer, David Nusinow. We talked about how to work around the infamous XCB bug with Java and also about the future of X including OpenGL support.
I really want to thank Matthias Klose and Michael Koch (and the other Java DD's) for helping me prepare my talk "OpenJDK and the Free Java Packaging Roadmap". The video is not yet posted, but I did publish the slides.
Among the other very cool things at Debconf7 were Bdale's talk on Software Defined Radio, and, of course, the Céilidh!
Following Debconf I needed to make a connection at Heathrow with only 90 minutes to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4. Fortunately Simon and Andrew warned me about taking the bus. We arrived 30 minutes late and, despite the tight timing, I made it to the departure gate on time. My bag, however, did not (and last I checked it is still in London). Friends warned me about LHR from the USA Today article. In the future I shall follow Simon's advice and pack everything in one bag -- following the European norms!
NOTE on submitting comments: The Roller software we use here at Sun is quite aggressive about which comments it likes. Please be patient if your comment which includes HTML is not displayed immediately. I will ensure it gets published the next time I check e-mail.
Posted by tmarble ( Jun 25 2007, 08:57:52 AM CDT ) Permalink
Comments:
Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.