Proposal: Clarifying the CSR rules for dealing with various kinds of -XX flags for hotspot

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Hello,

Catching up on email, I think the general thrust of the proposal is 
reasonable, but I have a few questions and comments.

First, what is the full space of kinds of builds, product XOR debug?

What syntactic conventions, if any, distinguish all these kinds of 
flags? Are product and manageable "-X" and all the others "-XX"? (I've 
previously suggested in jest that a "-XXX" prefix be used for less 
wholesome options.)

If so, rather than reading of the general CSR guidelines and concluding 
"[the guidelines] places all [HotSpot] -XX options into the same CSR 
basket," an alternative observation might be the HotSpot naming 
conventions choose to put multiple distinct kinds of options into the 
same small namespace. Do options commonly move between categories as 
part of their lifecycle (e.g. experimental -> product, etc.)?

Thanks,

-Joe

On 2/20/2018 11:27 PM, David Holmes wrote:
> Dear CSR Group Members,
>
> On behalf of the Hotspot team within Oracle, I would like to submit 
> this proposal regarding the CSR process for dealing with various -XX 
> Hotspot flags.
>
> If this is acceptable then we would like to see this clearly 
> documented on the OpenJDK site in a suitable location (and referenced 
> from both Hotspot wiki and CSR wiki).
>
> Thank you.
> David
> ------