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

[Erik Trimble]

On 3/10/2011 5:14 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> 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.

No matter how we structure the end JDK "forest" (and, I'm using forest 
in the generic term, not to infer use of the forest extension), I think 
it would be a good idea to have a top-level clone script that people can 
download for "one-click" usage.

Inside that script, we can do interesting things - say, like download a 
pre-built tarball of the whole Hg repo, then refresh it.  All sorts of 
interesting tricks become available if we go the route of encapsulating 
all the implementation details in a single script, and hide those 
details from the end-user.  They then end up with a stable interface to 
doing common tasks.

-erik




>>> 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

I think it's unlikely to be possible for the "developer install" script 
to be able to actually do any installation of other software.

However, it would certainly be a good place to have a Sanity Check - 
have the install script check for all the required software 
dependencies, and then spit out a summary of what you have, and what you 
are missing.


-- 
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA