Previously, I used a shell script to extract modification date ranges
from the Git history, but that was complicated and unreliable, so now
every file just gets the same year range in its copyright header. If
someone needs to know when a specific file was modified and by whom,
they can look at the Git history themselves; no need to include it
redundantly in the header.
Whereas the GNU Classpath port used the strategy of patching Classpath
with core classes from Avian so as to minimize changes to the VM, this
port uses the opposite strategy: abstract and isolate
classpath-specific features in the VM similar to how we abstract away
platform-specific features in system.h. This allows us to use an
unmodified copy of OpenJDK's class library, including its core classes
and augmented by a few VM-specific classes in the "avian" package.
