[vinzc]

Hi all.

I've started to "hack" OpenELEC, which is based on Kodi and I saw Java was said required to build Kodi. On the other hand I have Kodi installed on a Gentoo machine, on which Java is an optional component and Kodi still builds and works flawlessly without it. So out of curiosity I was wondering what Java is used for exactly.

[wsnipex]

java is needed for swig, which we use to generate parts of our code(interfaces like json-rpc and python).
It is only needed during bootstrap phase.
It is possible to ship pre-bootstrapped code, which is what gentoo does iirc.

[vinzc]

java is needed for swig, which we use to generate parts of our code(interfaces like json-rpc and python).
It is only needed during bootstrap phase.
It is possible to ship pre-bootstrapped code, which is what gentoo does iirc.

Ah, thanks for the explanation, wsnipex. That's very interesting indeed. I know where to look now :-) .

[ironic_monkey]

swig doesnt require java, it is just the kodi-specific code generator for python bindings. strictly speaking it doesnt require java, just the jre, since the generator is written in groovy.

just to be more precise.

[vinzc]

swig doesnt require java, it is just the kodi-specific code generator for python bindings. strictly speaking it doesnt require java, just the jre, since the generator is written in groovy.

just to be more precise.

Thanks for the precision, ironic_monkey. I guess lalr1.java is part of what you're talking about, right?

Note even with JRE there are dependencies (especially graphics libraries) that I couldn't avoid. My Gentoo development environment is headless as it's a chroot that I've setup on a Linux Mint machine. Even with JRE there were about 70 packages I had to pull to build OpenELEC. I have not enough time right now to fine tune it and it's absolutely not an annoyance, rather a curiosity I'd like to investigate some time when I can.