Is the "skip boot cycle" trick still needed?

[Alan Bateman]

On 10/09/2012 20:42, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> :
>
> Yes, jtreg tests would catch this too, but they take more time&  configuration than a
> simple second build, plus there are tests that are known to fail and areas that aren't tested.
A topic for another thread but the goal is that all tests should pass, 
we don't do "known failures". We're not there yet but one "tool" to be 
aware of is the exclude list for tests in the jdk repository 
(jdk/test/ProblemList,txt). You've probably see reviews/change-sets go 
by where people add or remove tests. Buggy tests should be added there 
as it is pointless running them. If you run jtreg directly then the 
-exclude option is used to specify the file, if you run the tests via 
the Makefile targets then it adds -exclude by default.

> One particular issue is with the way the OpenJDK build is structured.  I don't know if this
> has changed in the new build but I doubt it.  Because langtools, corba, jaxp, jaxws&  hotspot
> are built before the jdk on a full build, they inherently build against the bootstrap VMs
> version of classes they depend on (including some internal com.sun.*&  sun.* classes).
> So the second build will build these against the latest versions rather than the bootstrap
> versions, effectively giving a free test that the JDK can still build itself as well.  We
> spotted this in working on IcedTea, as obviously the internal classes aren't present on
> non-Sun/Oracle JDKs so the build had to patched to use the JDK source code.
Yes, this is a big problem with the old build system although the 
activity in the corba, jaxp, and jaxws repositories is quite low so it's 
not noticed very often there. However there have been occasions, one or 
two in the last year, where we've had issues there and boot cycle builds 
have caught it. From what I can this is not an issue in the new build 
system.

-Alan.