A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[M.E. O'Neill]

On Aug 16, 2011, at 15:27, Dan Ports wrote:
>>> [Speaking of which, I would think we should stop doing that; Java has been part of the base OS for years and I would be surprised if all of our Java ports really work with Kaffe instead. Does Kaffe itself even work nowadays?]

and Ryan Schmidt replied:
>> The ability to run java ports using kaffe has seemed entirely theoretical to me. We have a ticket from three years ago about kaffe not building on Leopard:
>> 
>> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/25558
>> 
>> It also hasn't been updated in years.
>> 
>> So we could keep the kaffe dependencies in place, since they don't really hurt anything and will be satisfied by the system Java, on the supposition that kaffe would still work on non-Mac OS X systems. Or we could acknowledge that nobody uses MacPorts on non-Mac OS X systems and take them out.

I'm an outsider, but it seems like a waste of project resources to consider/accommodate anyone who is using MacPorts on non-Mac OS X systems.

and then Joshua Root said:
> Lion is the beginning of the end for Apple-supplied Java. So maybe we'll need our own again soon. I think I saw kaffe fail on buildbot, so it's either broken or missing dependencies, on 10.6 at least.

As Dan observed, "...but hopefully it won't be Kaffe, which hasn't been updated in
years".  

In general, if Apple stops providing Java, Oracle will take up the slack.  I suspect it'll be much the way it is with Flash now -- Apple used to provide it, now you have to go to Adobe to download it.  (Or maybe MacPorts has ambitions to provide GNU Gnash as the system flash player too.)

    M.E.O.