Should we rename the MASTER forest?

[Mark Reinhold]

> Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:33:23 -0800
> From: peter.kessler at sun.com

>                                                ...  I think the need
> to fix things in two places will always be with us, no matter which
> way we clone the repositories.

Agreed.

> But as Neal points out, witht the main repository continuing forward,
> the engineers don't sit on their hands (or on private, untested
> workspaces) because management wants a release.  (I think the allocation
> of testing resources is an orthogonal issue, but I understand QA's
> reluctance to test individual engineer workspaces.)

It's not an orthogonal issue.  In the past we've delayed the creation of
master workspaces for new feature releases precisely because QA resources
weren't available to do the PIT (pre-integration testing) runs needed to
qualify changegroups for integration into the master.  That's been
interpreted by some as a message not to do any development work; I've
never quite understood why.

> If the top-level repository is called jdk, then it's weird that
> there's a jdk/jdk subdirectory.  Can we think of a better name for
> that?  jdk/jdk certainly isn't the whole JDK, since it doesn't
> contain the VM, langtools, or the other important bits.  I'd let
> the people that own that code come up with a name for it.

A bunch of us working on the Mercurial migration wracked our brains for
weeks trying to come up with a better name for that tree.  Suggestions
are still welcome (the sooner the better, obviously).

> I understand the impetus to call the top-level repository openjdk.
> At first I thought that would be confusing for the Sun engineers that
> still have to deal with the parts of the JDK that aren't open yet.
> But on second thought it might prevent accidents to have the stuff
> that's open in a directory with "open" in its name.  In the short
> term that might also remind people that OpenJDK is just the open
> parts of the JDK, because of the parts that are still encumbered
> (few and getting fewer).

The problem is that Sun engineers who do deal with closed code would
routinely be creating forests named "openjdk" that contain trees of
closed code.  That sounds really confusing.

- Mark