Commit responsibilities and Lines of Defense

[Andrew Haley]

On 02/18/2011 10:09 PM, Kelly O'Hair wrote:

> But there have been some roadblocks for the open source community.
>
> It has been observed (for a long time now) that:
> * The Mercurial jcheck extension needs to be open sourced
> * The bug tracking system needs to be completely open
> * We need an open build and test system for the OpenJDK developers who don't have access to all the systems
>
> We are working on it. And of course you have heard that before, but we are, really.

That's very good news, especially the bug tracking system.  I thought
that the plans to open that up had been abandoned with the Oracle
acquisition of Sun.

> It's that last item that involves myself and a group of Oracle engineers in Stockholm, hopefully we
> can come up with a solution that works for everybody. I have tentatively named it BAT for
> Build And Test, but it is just in the infancy stage, nothing official yet. But we would like some input.
>
> The intent would be to accept repository paths, tips, and changeset bundles or diffs (for test runs),
> run it through a matrix of builds and tests, and return back status or even do the Push if requested.
> Internally, we have such a system, but it's not clear exactly how much we can reuse.
>
> Due to the proprietary nature of some of the tests and systems, and also a need for security, it's not
> exactly clear how much data we can expose. But we should be able to run selected and critical tests for
> everyone, and of course verify there have been no build issues introduced by a change.

Fabulous.

> When all goes well, that is one thing, but when it doesn't and non-open tests fail, then it gets tricky.
> (yeah yeah we should open source the tests, that just can't happen in all cases).

It'll be tricky if some crucial flaw is revealed by a private test.  I
suppose in that case that an Oracle engineer will have to analyse the
problem.

> It is clear to us that we cannot make the system entirely "open", but we can provide a kind of portal
> (I hate that word), or view (a better word) into what is happening. Exposing what we legally can and
> hopefully providing enough information to make the system work for everyone.
>
> So what do you think? Any opinions out there?

This sounds like a big step forward, and a great way to show everyone
that Oracle is determined to work with the community.

Andrew.