Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Martin,

On Fri, 2008-12-19 at 10:37 -0800, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 09:53, Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp.org> wrote:
> > Still, if they were around I would indeed take a look and compare stuff
> > a bit with my local builds if I had any strange test failures for
> > example.
> >
> > Fedora 9 binaries would be fine for me, I am on Fedora 10 already :)
> > Although my servers are a mix of Debian stable and CentOS 5.
> >
> >> > But how would be tag these builds as "official"?
> >>
> >> I'm not sure I understand the question.
> >> Here "official" means there's been some release engineering love
> >> and an expectation of a minimal level of quality.
> 
> Let me expand on that a little.
> Every "build" coming from Sun has already had
> a significant amount of testing applied to it.
> For comparative testing, I would like to try the very same binaries
> that Sun must have already created.

Sure. But you need something that is completely automated and completely
reproducible by the rest of the community. For example in icedtea we
integrated all the tests in such a way that a simple make && make check
runs them. Producing binary artifacts only makes sense really if you can
do it methodically, otherwise you risk publishing things that depend on
some individual's setup. That also means having enough capacity to do it
on an ongoing basis. I'll see if we can finally expand
builder.classpath.org to provide something like this over the next
weeks, or that we would need to throw more hardware at it (which I think
we will need seeing that we are already using the servers mostly at
their capacity and having a build-bot for openjdk/icedtea will be
pushing it a bit I am afraid). Another issue is that we aren't currently
at zero-fail (ignoring the non-automated tests). It would be nice make
this a requirement.

Cheers,

Mark