Source tarballs

[John Rose]

On Dec 10, 2007, at 3:31 PM, Arnd-Hendrik Mathias wrote:

>> Now that the OpenJDK source is available "live" in the hg  
>> repositories it does not make sense to have source tar balls.  If  
>> we had tar balls this would be out of date with the live  
>> repositories, since this would be a snapshot of the repos at a  
>> given moment in time.
> I'd generally prefer to use specific snapshots (quite "stable"  
> tagged ones best) over checkouts of any arbitrary status (at least  
> for a dependable system for daily work).
That's what Xiomara meant about tagged versions.

>> What is preventing you from using hg to do a fclone and get the  
>> source?
> I am trying to resolve dependencies of other software to build and  
> install by updating my OpenJDK installation. Each additional  
> software package means additional effort


Somebody should blog a simple and complete step-by-step recipe for  
getting from a clean system to "hg fclone" and beyond to a build.
Then we could link that article prominently from the download site.   
Someday we'll have a wiki; that's the natural home of such information.
Or maybe it already exists, and I was unfortunate enough to miss it.

(I consulted such a recipe for setting up VMware on my MacBook and it  
saved me both time and frustration.)

One tricky bit is that you need three chunks of python:  hg itself,  
the fclone extension, and a newer version of python itself.

-- John