on amber repo management

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Hi,
to expand on what Brian said the other day [1], we are indeed going to 
treat the amber repo as a sandbox [1]. Changes will flow automagically 
from JDK10 to the amber default branch - in fact this process has 
already started [2]. We expect to start creating the feature branches 
over the next few days.

An important difference with respect to the sandbox repo, is that, in 
amber, upstream changes will be also automatically integrated in all the 
children branches. In other words, branches should always be in sync 
with JDK 10 (modulo conflicts to be resolved manually), avoiding the 
problems we have encountered in other openjdk projects.

As this is a biggie shift in the way we are used to things internally, 
there might be some initial hiccups - but the hope is that, in the long 
run, we should all benefit from this. First, developers (and users!) 
will be able to always take advantage of the latest features available 
in the upstream repo; secondly, this should minimize the process of 
creating webrevs against JDK N when a given branch is ready for prime time.

Happy hacking!

[1] - 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-dev/2017-March/000000.html
[2] - http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~chegar/docs/sandbox.html
[3] - 
http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-dev/2017-March/000003.html

Maurizio