CodeTools proposal: "friday stats"

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Name: Friday Stats

Summary: A collection of small custom utilities for analyzing the JDK 
code base.

Proposed by: Jonathan Gibbons

Rationale:

For a while now, some developers on the JDK team have indulged in an 
occasional practice of generating and publishing "Friday stats". These 
are emails, typically on a Friday, containing interesting or useful 
statistics about the OpenJDK code base. The emails are intended to 
highlight issues needing attention and to highlight progress that has 
been made.

Often, these emails are the result of creating and running small utility 
programs to analyze the code base and related files, like build logs. It 
is proposed that we should publish any such utilities to a new repo 
under the CodeTools umbrella. The goal is to make these utilities more 
widely available to anyone helping in "code cleanup" or reducing 
"technical debt" and to explore the usage of these utilities to provide 
"continuous monitoring" in a CI environment.

A popular topic for these emails has been the number of warnings 
generated when building OpenJDK, which continues to be an issue, even 
though significant progress has been made on a number of fronts. There 
are three utilities that we would like publish in this area.

1. A tool to report on the number of lint and doclint messages found in 
a given set of packages in a project.

2. A tool to analyze a build log and categorize the many various 
messages that a generated.

3. A simple tool to remove the expected set of "informational" messages 
from a build log, leaving the set of messages that deserve attention. 
The number of such lines is also generated, to facilitate generating a 
trend graph to monitor progress over time.

More details on these tools will be provided in due course. Although 
these initial utilities are focussed on warnings and other diagnostics 
occurring during an OpenJDK build, the name "Friday stats" is intended 
to be broad enough to include any utilities to generate any statistics 
about OpenJDK that might be of interest to OpenJDK developers while 
working on the OpenJDK code base.code-