Java policy and its lacks (Was: Various issues: kaffe, compilers, freeness, etc.

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Tuesday 27 July 1999, at 8 h 43, the keyboard of "Ean R . Schuessler" 
<ean@novare.net> wrote:

> like. I would tend to repeat the comments that others have stated
> regarding its weaknesses.

Caution: we are running straight into the problem that already killed the 
previous proposals. "It is not perfect, then keep going to discuss instead of 
solving problems." The current policy addresses *some* problems. It was never 
expected to solve them all. Many problems are out on hold in the current 
policy and discussed as such. Its official release should not be delayed until 
everything is settled.

> I think that we will be required to break
> Java offerings into several different groups of versions. It is
> arguable that we will even need things like jvm-1.1, jvm-1.2, 
> jvm-ms (microsoft extensions), java-classes-base-1.1, and others. I

References about the Java versiong scheme are welcome. I don't program in Java 
a lot myself, I just package stuff which I need. If there is an authoritative 
versioning scheme for the language (not the JDK), which is clearly referred to 
in the programs ("This release of the EarlGrey Java virtual machine interprets 
Java 1.2"), this is a sensible change to make to the policy.