Backporting JDK-8210483 to Java 11

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Vitaly/All,

With the new release cadence, comes a new responsibility for members of the
community to step up and start taking over some of the back-porting etc
themselves. We can't expect vendors like Oracle to keep fixing every stream
for free! Everyone has to eat :-).

At the recent OpenJDK Committers Workshop (only a couple of days ago), we
discussed adding more documentation to the wikis of the relevant projects
to aid newcomers in submitting patches.  The jdk11u project page/wiki will
get updated in the coming weeks as will others.

Please excuse the dust and have patience in the meantime, it's a transition
period and we're all adjusting to the new way of working!

Cheers,
Martijn


On Wed, 6 Feb 2019 at 15:27, Vitaly Davidovich <vitalyd at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 2:30 PM Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> > May I ask why there's no plan to backport this to 11? We're seeing the
>> same javac failure on our code, and simply moving to java 12 is a
>> non-starter given it's a non-LTS release.  Is there something fundamentally
>> difficult about backporting this fix to 11?
>>
>> You seem to implicitly assume that difficulty is the only criteria for
>> back porting, but that is not, and has never been, the case.  With the
>> advent of the rapid release cadence, where the next version is much closer
>> in time, the bar for back porting has gotten significantly higher.  (Back
>> porting any given issue might seem easy, but in the aggregate, back porting
>> in general has enormous costs, as well as stability risks.  We would prefer
>> to invest more of our efforts in feature development, and less in back
>> ports.)
>>
> Yes, I'd assume the difficulty and perceived (in)stability of a backport
> request would be weighed in the decision to backport or not.  But, this is
> a bug fix - javac fails on fairly pedestrian code.
>
>>
>> You have choices; you can stay on the leading edge (in which case the fix
>> is in 12), or you can stick with LTS.  Which features are back ported to an
>> LTS distribution is the choice of your LTS provider.
>
> Again, I'd imagine a javac bug of the sort here would be deemed critical
> to backport to an LTS release.  But ok, if the answer is "refer to your LTS
> provider", then so be it.
>
>>   If you are getting your LTS releases from a commercial contract (such
>> as Oracle’s Java SE subscription), you should ask for this through the
>> support channel you are paying for — that’s what its there for.  If you are
>> relying on LTS from OpenJDK, this is decided by whomever is leading the
>> 11-updates project.  Currently this has not been handed over from Oracle to
>> someone else, but that is likely to happen soon, in which case the updates
>> list would be the place for this request (or to volunteer to do the back
>> port!)
>>
>>
>>
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