How to check out the openjdk source code from the mercurial repositories

[David Holmes]

Dr Andrew John Hughes said the following on 03/11/11 10:57:
> On 06:40 Fri 11 Mar     , David Holmes wrote:
>> Stepping up a level, an initial download of openjdk need not involve
>> using mercurial at all. You can simply download a stable snapshot as a
>> tar file; 
> 
> This makes much more sense as a starting point for new users over having
> to handle Mercurial and checkouts.  It works fine if you just want to _use_
> the latest and greatest, not hack on it.

Even if you want to hack you can still do your initial download this 
way. The hg commands only come into play when you want to update things 
later.

>> or download an install script that will do whatever is
>> necessary behind the scenes to get a complete openjdk.
> 
> I don't know how that would work.  I guess IcedTea comes close to this idea
> in that it detects the needed settings for the build, rather than them all
> having to be passed as make variables.

I was thinking of a simple installer as used by various bits of 
software. For example for Linux you might download a script that simply 
contains the initial set of hg commands needed to get the forest. On 
windows it might automate downloading a tarball and extracting it.

>> Personally I'd
>> like to see that include the basic build tools as well - in which case I
>> don't care about "special extensions" as I just get a working toolkit. 
> 
> What do you mean by this?  Can you give an example?

I know this is not what most people want and not how most OS handle 
software packaging these days, but I think it would be useful to be able 
to grab a tools bundles for a given OS that includes the various tools 
and extras you need eg mercurial, ant, gcc, freetype - all the things 
the build docs tell you that you have to go and get to build openjdk. 
Just yesterday I had to go and grab freetype and get it installed on a 
machine; today I've had to install gawk and libasound2-dev. I find this 
a PITA.

I don't expect to see this happen, my point was that if you did have 
easy access to pre-packaged tools, then it wouldn't matter if openjdk 
required customized variants of those tools.

David