RFR: 8268860: Windows-Aarch64 build is failing in GitHub actions

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2021 13:10:36 GMT, Magnus Ihse Bursie <ihse at openjdk.org> wrote:

> GHA for Windows/aarch64 was disabled in [JDK-8268861](https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8268861). The problem with GHA for windows/aarch64 was due to using Visual Studio 14.28. (Why this suddenly *started* failing is a mystery for another time. Perhaps GitHub, or Microsoft, changed something...)
> 
> Upgrading to 14.29 (which is the default on the GitHub actions machines) solves the problem.
> 
> This patch contains a revert of JDK-8268861, followed by an upgrade to 14.29.

There were a bit of initial confusion in the actions bug you mention, but in the end that was also what supplied the solution. The quote about "VC instead of cygwin" is just confused and misleading; we are using VC (that is, Visual Studio) as well as Cygwin. When @dsame played around in his personal fork, he never changed any of these. But it piqued my interest when he said he got it building, so I had a closer look at what he actually did. There were some irrelevant changes, but the core fix was to remove the `--with-msvc-toolset-version` argument. This forced configure to pick up the standard installed version of msdev, and that one was correctly configured to build.

However, this is not a solution that we would like to have, since we want more control of what version is used to build. The price we pay for that, is to occasionally having to bump the version like this, when stuff starts to break. (We recently have to fix ubuntu builds when our selected compiler were removed from the apt sources.) So I changed this to explicitly set the version of msdev that worked.

I don't think we will ever find out what changed with the GHA environment. We are never going to have that kind of control over it. So we will just have to go with the flow, and patch submit.yml whenever we ran across new snags.

And the misunderstanding about how the build works resides purely in the Github action team. The documentation is clear enough, but I don't expect them to get any more knowledge about our building system.

-------------

PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/4681