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2 Get the Source

Chapter 2
Get the Source

The source code for the Jikes RVM is stored in a Git repository. You can browse the online Git repository at https://github.com/JikesRVM/JikesRVM.

A developer can either work with the version control system or download one of the releases. If you are interested in doing development of Jikes RVM you should probably use Git instead of downloading a release.

2.1 Download a Release

Major and minor releases of Jikes RVM occur at regular intervals. These releases are archived in the file download area in either tar-gzip (jikesrvm-¡version¿.tar.gz) or tar-bzip2 (jikesrvm-¡version¿.tar.bz2) format. Use your web browser to download the latest version of Jikes RVM then to extract the tar-gzip archive type:

$ tar xvzf jikesrvm-<version>.tar.gz

or for the tar-bzip2 archive type:

$ tar xvjf jikesrvm-<version>.tar.bz2

2.2 Use Git

The source code for Jikes RVM is stored in a Git repository. Git and other distributed revision control systems (e.g. Mercurial) are very different from centralized version control systems like CVS and Subversion. If you are not familiar with Git, you can find instructions on Git use at http://www.git-scm.com/doc. There is also a Git book.

After installing Git the current version of source can be downloaded via:

$ git clone https://github.com/JikesRVM/JikesRVM.git

This will clone the Jikes RVM repository into the newly created directory jikesrvm.

If you need a specific version, it is recommended to clone the complete repository nonetheless. You can then switch to a specific release, e.g. 2.4.6, by doing the following:

$ cd jikesrvm 
$ git checkout 2.4.6

If you are a not core developer you will not be able to push changes to the main Jikes RVM repository directly. If you want to contribute to the Jikes RVM, please take a look at this page.