Using GNU Classpath while changing his hierarchy

[Jean-Philippe Deblonde]

Hello,

I'm currently working on a project as a student training course. We're
building a VM to run Java code on embedded devices. The goal of the
project is to provide a tool to strip down this VM to the only needed
classes from the Java framework (since this VM will finally be burned
on some smart devices, with very few memory capacity).
The Sun API doesn't allow us to do something like this, so we are
using the GNU Classpath Project.
The project use his own hierarchy so, while incorporing classes from
Classpath, we need to change packages names (the root directory of the
project his fr.lifl.rd2p. so everything in java., java.lang for
example, will become fr.lifl.rd2p.lang, and so on...). In the process,
we need to change import references, and the hardcoded call in some
classes for other classes in the API (by example an hardcoded call to
java.io.IOException in some procedure prototype needs to be changed).

To help me do this tedious work, I have build a small app, taking a
config file with the patterns to substitute in the Classpath
hierarchy, and while copy the file in the new hierarchy, do the
substitutions.
Since the creation of this config file (an very big XML chunk of
patterns and strings) is a repetitious process, and I also don't want
to spend the rest of the training course on some copy/paste line work,
I've build a Swing GUI - a click-o-matic-like for the lines to be
substitued.

The GNU Classpath project evolves while I'm doing this. And some
substitution rules available for today won't be available in future
releases of the Classpath project. Some new classes/substitutions will
be introduced with each new version...

So, I post this message to ask if I'm not missing something in the
process, if there is a existing tool or some guidelines to help me
keep track of the diff in a streamlined way.

Do you have any comments or  suggestions ?

Jean-Philippe Deblonde