On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 12:51 +0200, Javier Barrio wrote:
> > If Java becomes a viable option again, an update will be posted.
> 
> What about using dev-java/kaffe?
> 

Javier,
On my systems, building kaffe today results in this failure:
============================================================
touch compile-classes
if test "" != ""; then  -r -D glibj.zip gnu java javax org META-INF
> /dev/null; fi
if test "/usr/bin/jar" != ""; then /usr/bin/jar cf glibj.zip gnu java
javax org META-INF; fi
basename: missing operand
Try `basename --help' for more information.
Home for VM '' does not exist: 
==============================================================
To be fair, I suspect this is a side-effect of the fact that a while ago
I was playing with various javas on sparc to see if there was one which
could handle one specific application (netlogo).  There was not.  But I
left my system in an unknown state from a java perspective.

That said, at that time kaffe could be built, and it worked sort of.  It
probably could be made to work if you or someone wished to work on it.

Another candidate is sablevm.  It builds fine and seems to work (now, I
built it by hand; not with the ebuild because the portage versions are
out of date among other things.  The problem I had with it is that is
missing some features and the java version it corresponds to
sun-jdk-1.3, and my application needs -1.4.?, or, better, -1.5.  sablevm
could possibly be made to work as Java on sparc, but it would require
some effort (the product itself seems solid, but it to an older version
of java.  Now, I was playing with -1.12, and current is -1.13.  I might
play with it again myself, in fact.  NOTE, however, that the portage
version is 17 or 18 months out of date, so if you want to play with
sablevm right now, it's do it yourself.)  See http://sablvem.org for
details.

Note further that I am not a java user.  I need one application which
requires a java machine.  If frustrated sparc java users would like to
evaluate sablevm as a feasible java for gentoo sparc, I think that would
be useful to us.

Hope this helps;
Regards,
Ferris 
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@g.o>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)