Quick confirmation

[John Rose]

On Jan 25, 2008, at 2:20 AM, Volker Simonis wrote:

> I've also noticed that there are no updates in the Mercurial
> repositories since the inital b24 upload. Is this because of the
> distributed nature of mercurial and the fact that every team inside
> SUN keeps their own, private repositories?

Yes and no.  There have been no integrations yet because the
integration repos. and associated machinery are still being
carefully tested.  Some of this stuff, like commit message format
and the mechanical checking of project design rules,
has to be right the first time.  At least, that's my understanding
of the situation; I'm doing JVM work, not (currently incredibly
important) software process work.

Meanwhile, various engineers (like me) are accumulating
changes into personal repos.  I'm using mq so I have maximum
flexibility of changeset factoring up to the moment of commit.
You can see a couple of my changes out for review here, FWIW:
   http://homepage.mac.com/rose00/work/webrev/index.htm

> Is there a possibility to access such private group/team areas or can
> we poor external developers only observe the bulk integrations into
> the master area?

Absolutely not... because we threw away those areas last year.

We're not holding anything back from you that we are not
temporarily holding back from ourselves also.  We closed
down our internal (Teamware-based) group integration
areas in December.  What you see on the web is the
real thing, and you will see individual engineer change
sets dribble in one by one, as each engineer commits
to his or her group's integration area.  (Mine happens to
be "comp", since I'm in the compiler group.)

I wish I could say exactly when that will be, but it is
not for me to say, except that your feelings of anticipation
are shared by every single Sun JDK and JVM engineer.

After all, 15 years worth of hard-won, fine-tuned,
and entrenched change management culture and
(Teamware) tools is not something you change overnight,
especially on a code base so large and mission critical
as Java.

I think a December/January transition period is
amazing, and (despite moments of impatience)
my hat is off to the people who are currently putting
in the long hours painting the walls and laying
down the carpet in the new mansion.

Meanwhile (to continue the home building metaphor)
we're camping out on the subfloor and eating out a lot.

Literally, we're learning hg and mq, accumulating patches
in various ad hoc ways, and coding as always.

Happy camping!
-- John