aarch32 project process

[Edward Nevill]

Hi all,

I would like to discuss the aarch32 project process. IE. the process for
submitting patches for aarch32 and having those patches approved and
pushed.

It would seem that I have become a defacto 'gatekeeper' and this was not
my intention. There are currently 6 committers on the project, however I
seem to be the only committer pushing patches.

Unfortunately, I have been quite busy at work at the moment and as this
work is not sponsored by my employer, I have to try to find 'spare' time
to do it. I expect that I will have more time available for this work
after June 14.

In order that my tardiness does not delay anyone I would like to propose
the following.

- Since we have no formal Reviewers on the project any patch may be
approved by any other committer. I think it would be preferable that the
other committer does not work for the same company.

- Any committer can then push a patch once it has been approved as
above. It would be good practice to allow 24 hours before pushing a
patch after it has been proposed in order to allow sufficient time to
review the patches.

- It greatly eases the process of reviewing/pushing patches if the
patches are submitted using the 'webrev' tool (see
http://openjdk.java.net/guide/webrevHelp.html) and if the patch is
committed before running webrev. In this case the patch becomes a
changeset, in which case the reviewer/committer can simply do "hg import
<patch>" followed by "hg push". However, I understand that it is
sometimes not possible for contributors to create changesets if they do
not have OpenJDK IDs.

- At the moment we are creating OpenJDK bugids for every change. This
has some value in that it is possible to look at a change, refer back to
the original bug report to see what the actual problem was. Also, if the
bug ID is mentioned in the header of the email to the list it makes it
easy to trace any discussion regarding the change. For this reason I
would like to keep the policy of having OpenJDK bugids, but I do
understand that it is an extra administrative overhead and am open to
persuasion.

At the moment the list of committers are

http://openjdk.java.net/census#adinn
http://openjdk.java.net/census#aph
http://openjdk.java.net/census#bae
http://openjdk.java.net/census#jjoyce
http://openjdk.java.net/census#vkarnauk
http://openjdk.java.net/census#enevill

If there is a need for additional committers I am quite happy to propose
additional committers. Ideally any proposed committers should already
have OpenJDK ids and should have contributed some patches to OpenJDK (I
think the magic number is 8, but there is some flexibility with this,
especially for non trunk projects such as the aarch32 port).

In the meantime I will try to get to reviewing the outstanding patches
ASAP.

All the best,
Ed.