New Group Proposal: OpenJDK Conformance

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi David,

On Mon, 2007-10-01 at 07:27 -0700, David Herron wrote:
> Andrew John Hughes wrote: 
> > On Monday 01 October 2007 08:58:57 Mark Wielaard wrote:
> >   
> > > This sound great. One idea for this is inviting Stuart Ballard (CCed).
> > > His japitools http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/ have been a great part
> > > of the communities conformance and compatibility drive.    
> > 
> > Seconded; Stuart's tools have been invaluable during the development of GNU 
> > Classpath and are equally applicable as general tools for ensuring binary API 
> > compatabillity between releases.
> >   
> 
> We use some similar tools in-house. 

So, how do they compare to japi-tools? How are they used? Are the
results of running the tools and the source available to the public? And
are they intended to become free software as part of openjdk?

> > The quality page already has plenty of nice metrics:
> > 
> > http://openjdk.java.net/groups/quality/
> > 
> > It would seem an appropriate place for further conformance-related ones.
> >   
> 
> Thank you for the kind words about the Quality group pages.

It is deserved. If only you promoted it more and talked about it more.
It really is worth it. Maybe you could post something whenever one of
the metrics pages shows something interesting or surprising.

> Both teams have a significant number of engineers, which I think is
> indicative of the significance of Conformance to validating the
> platform.  I don't know the numbers but the SQE and JCK teams are
> closer to equal size than you might expect.

But will those engineers actually participate in openjdk? The reason we
probably don't expect anything is that to be honest you guys and girls
are awfully quiet! The last posting on the quality-discuss [*] was 3
months ago... So the question really is whether or not for an email once
every couple of months we need a whole new group, project and separate
mailinglists and webpages? It is really hard to keep track of openjdk
already with all those separate, sparse groups for someone not on the
inside of Sun.

Cheers,

Mark

[*] Bug report! http://openjdk.java.net/groups/quality/ mentions a list
called quality-dev which doesn't seem to exist, or is this where all the
discussion really goes to?