Build Infrastructure Project

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 16:12 Fri 20 May     , Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

This sounds great and long overdue.  I'd be happy to be involved if possible.

IcedTea currently has to force make -j1 on the OpenJDK build... :-(
-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and IcedTea
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://icedtea.classpath.org
PGP Key: F5862A37 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EA30 D855 D50F 90CD F54D  0698 0713 C3ED F586 2A37