Should we rename the MASTER forest?

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 08/11/2007, Mark Reinhold <mr at sun.com> wrote:
>
> In the experimental JDK 7 forests on http://hg.openjdk.java.net we've
> carried over an old naming convention that we at Sun have used for all
> primary JDK TeamWare workspaces for many years.  (The primary workspace
> is the one into which all group workspaces integrate, and from which
> the product is built by the release-engineering team.)
>
> That convention is to name these primary workspaces MASTER, in all caps,
> in order to stress their importance and help prevent accidental putbacks
> or, worse, corruption in the case of naive developers who cd directly
> into the MASTER tree and try to do work there.  (Yes, this has happened,
> more than once.)
>
> These sorts of accidents could happen under TeamWare because workspaces
> are shared via NFS and are (essentially) world-writable.  In the new
> world of Mercurial, of course, that's not the case.  Our server-side
> infrastructure will, moreover, only allow trusted developers to push
> changes into repositories/forests.
>
> So there's no longer much reason to use the annoying name MASTER, and
> there's at least one reason not to: Issuing the obvious hg command to
> get a local clone of the MASTER, i.e.,
>
>     % hg fclone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/MASTER
>
> will create a local forest named MASTER -- but of course it isn't the
> master, it's just a clone.  Such names can propagate, too [1], leading
> to even wider potential confusion.
>
> Given all this I hereby propose that we rename the MASTER forest simply
> to "jdk7".  That way an hg fclone will create a local forest with a more
> obvious name, and we can all give our shift keys a well-earned rest.
>
> Comments?
>
> (This may seem a trivial issue, but names are important, and once we go
> live with Mercurial it'll be difficult to change this one.)
>
> - Mark
>
>
> [1] http://www.jfrog.org/hg/openJDK/MASTER -- I'm sure Frederic wasn't
>     trying to confuse anybody when he published this forest, he just
>     did the obvious thing.
>


jdk7 seems a bit odd, given that presumably the mercurial repositories will
live on beyond the release of version 7.  How about simply jdk?  Or am I
missing some subtle point that means we can't simply mark a snapshot that
was the jdk7 release?
-- 
Andrew :-)

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