Feedback on the New Build System

[Andrew Hughes]

I've just got my first build out of the new system using the main jdk8/jdk8 tree (b80) and
so thought it was worth giving some feedback on the problems encountered and issues
with the end result:

1.  It took some time to work out how to get back to the usual 'noisy' build as the
default seems to subdue all the useful output.  VERBOSE=true broke the build when
it tried to use 'true' as a Makefile target.  It turns out the solution is the rather
non-obvious VERBOSE= .  Could we not have this documented somewhere and perhaps have
verbosity as a configure option?  After grepping around, it's not very obvious to me
where it gets set.

2.  One of the javac calls in the jdk tree fails with:

/home/andrew/projects/openjdk/upstream/jdk8/jdk/src/share/classes/javax/swing/JSpinner.java:43: error: package sun.util.locale.provider does not exist
/home/andrew/projects/openjdk/upstream/jdk8/jdk/src/share/classes/javax/swing/JSpinner.java:44: error: package sun.util.locale.provider does not exist
/home/andrew/projects/openjdk/upstream/jdk8/jdk/src/share/classes/javax/swing/JSpinner.java:45: error: package sun.util.locale.provider does not exist

This package is in the jdk8 tree but not in the build JDK (7).  Oddly, the build
continues despite this error and the final rt.jar does include JSpinner.

3.  -Werror is set for the SCTP native code causing the build to fail:

Lots of stuff like:

/home/andrew/projects/openjdk/upstream/jdk8/jdk/src/solaris/native/sun/nio/ch/sctp/SctpChannelImpl.c:88:24: error: unused parameter 'klass' [-Werror=unused-parameter]

as -Werror is passed and -Wno-unused doesn't seem to turn these off.  SCTP_WERROR=
worked around it (perhaps this should at least be WARNINGS_ARE_ERRORS to match HotSpot?)

Do we have a preferred way to fix these errors?  I know about __unused__ but I believe this
is GCC-specific and I wouldn't want to break the build on other platforms (Solaris, MacOS X, BSD).

4.  It's odd that the default 'make' no longer means 'make all' and 'make' on its own doesn't produce
a JDK image to use.  This will be confusing for newcomers who miss that important 'all' word or people
like me who go by the usual presumption that the default argument to make is 'all', but appears to have
been subverted here.

5.  The final image produces:

openjdk version "1.8.0-internal"

from -version.  I can't remember whether or not the internal was there before and we suppressed it in IcedTea,
but we've definitely always had 'java version' and not having this will break numerous applications (possibly
including the JDK build, as I know at least the old one used to check the version).

Hope this helps.  I'm happy to produce patches for some of these issues, but wanted to discuss the best way
forward first.

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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