Build Infrastructure Project

[Kelly O'Hair]

On May 20, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:

> On 13:11 Fri 20 May     , Kelly O'Hair wrote:
>> 
>> We now have a Build Infrastructure project!
>> 
>> Register for email at:
>>  http://mail.openjdk.java.net/mailman/listinfo/build-infra-dev
>> 
>> The repos will be at:
>>   http://hg.openjdk.java.net/build-infra/jdk7
>> 
>> But I haven't been able to populate them just yet, having access issues.
>> 
>> Once the repos are primed, I hope this can get moving quickly because I want to expose
>> what can be done to the builds in terms of turnaround improvements etc.
>> 
>> -kto
>> 
> 
> Hi Kelly,
> 
> Sorry if I missed this already, but what is the purpose of this new project?

Once I can get the build-infra repos primed, hopefully you will see what we are doing.
I don't expect this project to last past the final jdk8 efforts, it's a sandbox for us to experiment
and stabilize build changes.

The big goal is to make builds faster, orders of magnitude faster, with some major
makefile re-writing and organization.
An additional goal is to try and make building easier, but that part of it is mostly directed
at the Solaris and Windows builds, Linux isn't that hard (in my opinion :).

The reason for the project is that this will be major build changes, and we will need
to experiment and share our work as quickly as possible, and openly as possible.
Once the changes prove to be stable and acceptable, then we will deal with the transition to
jdk8, and leave the jdk7 changes for potentially being included into jdk7u2, but jdk8 is
our primary target.

One sub-project will be "BuildDeps" which will try and address how the build dependencies are
identified and how local installs are automated. Haven't much detail on that yet.

The major sub-project will be a re-write of the Makefiles to remove the deeply nested Makefiles,
correct the target dependencies, allow for "make -j N" to work reliably, share common make logic,
paralyze the javac compilations, etc. Pretty drastic stuff, but if we can indeed make the builds
orders of magnitude faster, we hope people will welcome the changes.

Hopefully Fredrik and Erik will chime in for clarification when I mis-state things.

We are looking to turn around some of this work very quickly, so it's an E ticket ride if
you want to watch or join in (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_ticket).  ;^)

-kto

> I thought we already had build-dev...
> -- 
> Andrew :)
> 
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