OpenJDK 6 Build 17

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/11/10 Greg Lewis <glewis at eyesbeyond.com>:
> G'day Andrew,
>
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 02:12:17AM +0000, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>> 2009/11/10 Kurt Miller <kurt at intricatesoftware.com>:
>> > It would be fantastic if Sun would host a mercurial repository
>> > for OpenJDK6 (i.e. bsd-port6 or the like). Is there a chance that
>> > Sun could set that up for us? The lack of a central repository is
>> > one of the reasons I haven't worked on OpenBSD support for OpenJDK.
>>
>> Rather than creating a new separate tree, how about we just try and
>> get the necessary changes into OpenJDK6 directly?
>> Then that would give a good base to move forward on getting support in 7 too.
>
> For me, the latter is the key question.  How do we move forward with
> getting BSD support (ultimately) into the current development tree so
> we have less heavy lifting to do going forward?
>
> That's what I'd really like to come out of the discussion here.  I think
> we've been pretty good at keeping the bsd-port tree of OpenJDK7 up to date
> (its currently at b75 and I'll start moving it to b76 once that tag goes
> down) but we still don't seem to be any closer to getting the changes into
> the main source tree than we were when we started.  How do we move forward
> with that?  Is Sun's preferred method for us to go through OpenJDK6?  That
> certainly doesn't seem to have been the case for Zero, which is probably
> of a similar order of disruption, but I'm open to it for the BSD patches if
> there is a solid reason for doing it that way.
>

Much as I hate having piles of patches with IcedTea that break on
every new build, it does mean you have a todo list of what needs to go
upstream.  With the BSD tree, I just see a JDK7 forest and I'm not
familiar enough with it to know the scale of what needs to go
upstream.

I was probably being a bit naive in suggesting OpenJDK6; that would
only work if the number of patches is small and trivial.  It was a gut
reaction to the thought of creating another forest with all the
patches mixed in I guess.

The approach we've taken with IcedTea is just to submit each patch one
by one against the main trees and to get it approved and pushed.  It's
an arduous process and the time it takes to get a patch depends both
on the size/effect of the patch and the team to which it is being
submitted.  In my experience so far, build and core libraries patches
tend to go through pretty quickly, HotSpot/AWT/Swing seem to involve a
fair bit more work and I'm still waiting on a full response for a
crypto-related patch.  Zero is of course the big success story so far
:)

If the entire BSD patchset is approximately the size of Zero, then
breaking it up should result in some small patches that should go in
pretty easily.  So I think that's the first option to take; find a
suitably small change, do a webrev for it against the appropriate JDK7
forest and post it to the appropriate list.  You can work out which is
appropriate using http://openjdk.java.net/guide/repositories.html

> Certainly its starting to get a little demotivating to me personally and
> I can't help but wonder if other team members don't feel the same.
>
> Andrew, this isn't aimed at you at all, btw, you're just kinda touching
> on a bit of a sore spot :).
>

Oh it's ok I understand -- as an external contributor trying to get
the stack of IcedTea patches upstream, I feel your pain...
If there's anything I can do to help, let me know.

> Dalibor, who needs to be involved in such a discussion and what can I do
> to help move it forward?
>
> --
> Greg Lewis                          Email   : glewis at eyesbeyond.com
> Eyes Beyond                         Web     : http://www.eyesbeyond.com
> Information Technology              FreeBSD : glewis at FreeBSD.org
>



-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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