Harness source availability; was: Re: JavaSE 7 build 15 is available at the openjdk.java.net website

[Mario Torre]

Il giorno ven, 06/07/2007 alle 18.54 -0700, David Herron ha scritto:
> 
> Hey Mark,
> 
> That's good feedback and it will make for an interesting counterpoint
> when I talk with my managers next week.
> 
> FWIW my thought regarding releasing the source to our (SQE's) harness
> is that I don't know how y'all will respond to this harness.  If we
> release it and you hate it then we will have wasted a lot of man-hours
> getting it published.  I'm thinking to release the binary, look at the
> response, and then act accordingly.  But it sounds like you're likely
> to ignore it and I won't be able to judge the response ...
> 
> Hurm.
> 
> - David Herron

Hi David!

Just my two cents... As part of the Mauve (and Classpath of course)
developers I've learned how tests are even more important on a
jvm/classlibrary when you need to assure a quality level to your
products, no matters how the test harness is done. More over, people
tests things in a variety of ways, for example, few days ago Andrew John
Hughes told me that his work on JikesRVM with Classpath exposed a number
of interesting bugs and that we should include building JikesRVM by
default in our testing cycle (and most of our tests are not even part of
Mauve, but are simple or real life applications [1]).

I don't get the point of "If we release it and you hate it then we will
have wasted a lot of man-hours getting it published". Sure, there is
risk... but if we don't like it, we will change it!

The more the tests, the better the result. So, if this can be of any
help, and you don't have any legal stuff to be worried about, I'm sure
we will welcome the new bits just like we did with OpenJDK, Netbeans,
Glassfish and OpenOffice (oh, yeah, and Solaris! missing something
else?)

After all, the only possibility I see for us to reject the harness is
that it is of very poor quality and actually it is useless, but this is
science fiction given the high level of your engineers. Of course, if
that is the case, you have worse problem to take care about! :) [2]

Just my 0.02 €.

Ciao,
Mario

[1] Even wild free software projects spend lots of time testing, yeah,
we like to watch our code running :)
[2] Just kidding, I was really impressed at FOSDEM about what you said
on this matter.
-- 
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