Bit of a status update

[Kelly O'Hair]

The Build-Infra project has been progressing, so I just wanted to give a short public status report and let people
know what we are working on.

* MinGW/MSYS - Mostly Tim Bell working on this. Plan is to integrate changes to JDK8 that allow for the use
    of MinGW/MSYS to build on Windows XP and Windows 2003 X64 (Windows 7 should work too).
    CYGWIN is so problematic on Windows 2003 X64 and Windows 7 X64 that we want this MinGW/MSYS option.
    Many thanks to Volker Simonis for his original work on this.
    Initially Tim will integrate the changes to allow the old (default) Makefiles to build with MinGW/MSYS, then
    the plan was to get it to work with the new build-infra Makefiles.

* CYGWIN issues with 'make images'. We are experiencing some hangs with GNU make when the new build-infra
    makefiles perform the 'make images' target. We are actively tracking this in parallel to Tim's work above, so depending
    on what we find out, we might terminate this investigation if MinGW/MSYS pans out.
    It is becoming clear that CYGWIN could be the wrong choice in the long run if we can't get it stable and also faster.
    (Keep in mind that MKS will NOT work with build-infra, so it's CYGWIN or MinGW/MSYS at this point).

* Stability. We want these new Makefiles to be rock solid, so we are hitting it hard to make sure we know the weak
    spots and fix them. Fast builds are great, but they also need to be rock solid, stable, and predictable.

* Binary comparisons. We are doing some significant work to try and get a better handle on the comparison process
    where we will make sure that the new Makefiles create the same j2sdk-image as the old Makefiles.
    Where we can we want "identical" bits, which is sometimes a bit tricky to define on some files.
    The general feeling is that being able to compare built images is an immediate help and also a long term benefit
    we would like to have for the long run.

* Another jdk8/build sync up. Coming soon, we wanted to do some build-infra stabilization first before we refresh the
    build-infra Makefiles in the public jdk8 areas.

* When will we make the default build use build-infra? Hard to tell, but until we get the comparisons in good shape
    for all platforms, we can't make the switch. We also have some work to get the rest of the Oracle JDK to work with
    these new build-infra Makefiles. But things are progressing and it's looking better and better.

Please let us know if you are still having issues using the new Makefiles.

-kto

P.S. There has been some talk of upgrading the official Build systems or MBE
   http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/build/raw-file/tip/README-builds.html#MBE
Not Solaris, but Linux/gcc and Windows.
So we are keeping this in mind but it's not part of the build-infra project right now.
Tentatively we were thinking Windows 7 X64 and Ubuntu 12.04 X64, but Windows 7 X64 and
CYGWIN seems to be worse than Windows 2003 X64 and CYGWIN. :^(
If you have any feedback on this, please let us know.