Improving source drops documentation

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 10:52 Tue 11 Oct     , Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> My plan of record has been to just unzip these bundles right into the repositories and get rid of this painful
> situation, that I have to confess, I created. :^(
> But I was thinking I could come up with some kind of way to paint these sources RED or something so
> that people do not patch these files, but instead feed changes to the upstream jaxp and jaxws open source projects.
> These files are like generated files, re-packaged and different legal notices from the originals, by the
> jaxp and jaxws teams.
> 
> I could just declare 'do not edit these files unless you have approved' and hope that people obey that rule.
> 
> I just haven't had the cycles to deal with this of late.
> 
> This is a sore point in building that we really need to fix.
> 

FWIW, I recently did exactly that in IcedTea because I'm sick of all the problems this drop solution causes.
This has cut things down from needing five tarballs (jaxp + jaxws repositories + three drop zips) to two with
everything in.  Should someone really want to build from the tarballs, they can just delete the sources.

I don't see why touching the files is a problem; surely all changesets have to pass review and any that attempt to
alter this files would just not do so?  What am I missing?

> -kto
> 
> On Oct 11, 2011, at 2:14 AM, Dan Smith wrote:
> 
> > I build infrequently, but when I do, I often get errors due to out-of-date jaxp and jax-ws source bundles.  My typical process is something like this:
> > 
> > 1) Start to build
> > 2) Observe a failure complaining about an improper $ALT_DROPS_DIR
> > 3) Track down my note where I wrote down the URL where I can get to a Web view of /java/devtools/...
> > 4) Navigate to the right folder and look for file timestamps that are more recent than the last time I did this
> > 5) Download & save the appropriate files to my source drops dir
> > 6) Try again
> > 
> > I think this is more or less the "best practice," but correct me if I'm wrong.  In particular, I'm not relying on mounted access to the /java filesystem, as I think most veteran Sun employees do, and I'm not using ALLOW_DOWNLOADS, which is discouraged in the build documentation.
> > 
> > Short of getting rid of the source drops entirely, it seems like there's a lot that could be done to streamline this process.
> > 
> > - It would be nice if the sanity check caught the missing files, rather than waiting to complain in the middle of the build.  (Fortunately, at least these get built early.)
> > 
> > - The error message would be a lot more useful if it told me the name(s) of the missing file(s) (which includes the version number) rather than assuming that my ALT_DROPS_DIR setting is wrong.
> > 
> > - Even better, the error message could spit out the URL(s) where I could download the file(s)!  (This should be the same URL as used by ALLOW_DOWNLOADS.)
> > 
> > - The docs ("Creation of New Source Drop Bundles") say the OpenJDK team puts new bundles in "/java/devtools/...", which is difficult to access.  (Can non-Oracle folks get to it? I rely on the javaweb internal server, which happened to be down today...)  Is/could this directory be made available somewhere public, too?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Dan
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

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

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