LarsWestergren's Journal: Building JDK7 on Suse10.1

How that JDK is being open sourced, I thought it would be interesting to build JDK7, so here are some notes from my experiment in case anyone is interested. I shall try to submit bugs that I find whether they are in Linux, Netbeans or Java, and if my programming skills are up to it I will try to solve them.

Day 1: Latest Netbeans (Relase Candidate 1) downloaded. Needs Java 5 to start, but I have (yet again) problems with Yast in Suse 10.1, it instantly crashes whenever I try to update anything, so I'll just download JDK6 from Sun manually.

Once JAVA_HOME is set, Netbeans starts. Notably faster startup on JDK6, Swing is snappier now, plus very nice anti-aliased fonts. Swing is defenitly catching up with SWT quickly. Subversion plugin downloaded and installed from within Netbeans without any problems. No "checkout from svn/cvs as new project" that I could see, this is something that I'm missing from Eclipse. The subversion menu has a "checkout" command though, it is the only enabled menu command, so I'll guess I try that, and try to import the sources as a new project once it is done.

Repository location URLs for JDKs are a bit hard to find, but I finally found it at this blog. You will need a username and password to do a checkout for now, but this will hopefully change as the open sourcing process continues. The Netbeans checkout wizard fast and easy, but once checkout starts, there is only no svn output feedback by default, just a "process running" animation. I have to go the destination dir to see the files appear, not very good, if download grinds to a halt, will I be able to see it? I have a very slow DSL (damn you, Spray!), so I leave the computer alone for an hour. When I come back, Netbeans is appearently still running the checkout process, but repeated "df" command from bash shows that the download must have halted, nothing is appearing on the drive. Just what I worried would happen. Netbeans should either add svn output so we can see what is happening, or a timeout.

I kill the Netbeans checkout process, and try to find a way in the preferences to get a visible svn output in Netbeans, but no luck. I go to command line instead, clean up the old locks, and try running an update. Seems to work, and now I see progress for each file. Seems command line is the way to go... for now at least, we shall see if it works better once a project is imported in Netbeans. End day one.