Building OpenJDK 7 On Mac OS X 10.5

i) OK, first off OpenJDK 7 is still a moving target, and will require use of the source control systems it is stored in - this is Mercurial (rather than svn or CVS) - usually abbreviated hg (as per the symbol for the element mercury).

ii) The Mac user is also at a disadvantage as we're dependent on the BSD port, which may lag behind the Linux and Windows builds.

iii) All of this requires Leopard. Tiger's compilers and build tools are simply a world of pain (and may actually be completely impossible). Just give it up and upgrade - you also need XCode 3.1.

Check you do actually have XCode installed - just checking for the presence of gcc from a command line does not do this - it is possible to have ended up with gcc installed but not XCode. If XCode is not installed, the eventual build step will fail with a cryptic error (possibly about fonts or FreeType) which does not clearly indicate that XCode is missing.

Getting Started

Get Mercurial
Mercurial is a relatively simple, modern version control and patching system. It's written in Python and will install to /usr/local/bin (plus a few well-behaved extensions in the standard python place).

See: http://openjdk.java.net/guide/repositories.html#installConfig

You want version 0.9.4 or 0.9.5 - not any of the post-1.0 versions

The instructions on getting Forest are missing one very important step. They don't tell you how to actually get the extension itself.

There seem to be two ways:

1) Go to the public repository (http://hg.akoha.org/hgforest/), and click on the top link, then the 'files' link on the changeset description page, then the 'raw' link at the top and save it with the other extensions (/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/hgext/ on a Mac)

2) Some way to use hg itself to pull the latest version from the repository but I figured I'd done enough yak shaving by this point and didn't figure out how to do this. Instructions on how to do this part very welcome.

Once you have Forest set up you should be able to continue with the instructions from installConfig, but please ensure that you also add the line:

hgext.mq=

to the end of your extensions section. This tells Mercurial to activate the Mercurial Queues extension, which is used for patching. It's always referred to as MQ in the Mercurial docs, which makes it difficult to find any useful information about it, as that acronym is hopelessly overloaded, and is swamped by hits from IBM's messaging middleware product.

Note: If you fail to activate this line in .hgrc, then the main patching step will inexplicably fail with a cryptic error message later.

With all of this done, you should have a working hg install. Test it out with a couple of:

hg version
hg showconfig
hg help

and if all seems well, change to your work directory and check out the main Mac source:

hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/bsd-port/bsd-port

This could take a while, depending on your connection speed.

Next, we want to build this version to ensure that our build process is nice and clean before patching for invokedynamic.

Building a Vanilla OpenJDK7
First we need to download SoyLatte, which is an older Java 6 port for Mac. This is to allow us to bootstrap the compilation of OpenJDK 7.

See:

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/java/SoyLatte_Meets_OpenJDK.20080819.html

and

http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/

to download the actual binary JDK - we want the 32-bit version for now.

If you've followed the notes from Landon Fuller above, you should now be ready to build. This step is:

make ALT_JDK_IMPORT_PATH=/usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3 ALT_BOOTDIR=/usr/local/soylatte16-i386-1.0.3 ALT_BINARY_PLUGS_PATH=$HOME/jdk-7-icedtea-plugs ALT_FREETYPE_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/X11R6/include ALT_FREETYPE_LIB_PATH=/usr/X11R6/lib ALT_CUPS_HEADERS_PATH=/usr/include ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant NO_DOCS=true HOTSPOT_BUILD_JOBS=1

If all goes well, you should now have a build of OpenJDK 7, which you should save to /usr/local - and save the source tree too just in case.

The current state of the repo is that this build is failing, and is being actively worked on, so I'll stop here, and will carry on next time with details of how to apply the invokedynamic patches to build what we need for mlvm.