Support for Netscape/Mozilla plug-in on Linux AMD64 native platform

[Andrew Haley]

David Herron writes:
 > Dalibor Topic wrote:
 > > Kurt Miller wrote:

 > > While Sun may not be interested in merging in all such ports into the
 > > main OpenJDK tree, it could be useful to have the patch sets maintained
 > > centrally as part of the OpenJDK infrastructure. The distributed 
 > > mercurial
 > > setup could give us that liberty, I think.

 > I'm very much in agreement with any move in this direction.
 > 
 > I have a concern which I've heard some people inside Sun speak.  
 > Namely:  Who will be responsible for the quality of these ports?

The maintainers of those ports.  Who else could possibly do it?  Other
people may not even have the hardware.

 > At the meeting we held at FOSDEM I remember the lecture we had in
 > the operation of the GCC project and how they go about supporting
 > lots of CPU architecture and OS platform combinations.  On the one
 > hand I think the OpenJDK has the potential to have that same
 > breadth of platform support.  But if it's at the cost of the Sun
 > quality engineering team it will not work.
 > 
 > I think hosting a project like this has to be coupled with a plan
 > for maintaining quality in that project.

Why is this any different from any other free software project?  The
maintainers of each target will make sure it gets built and tested.

If the XYZ port of OpenJDK doesn't work, then that's a bug against the
XYZ port, and the XYZ maintainers will have to fix it.  If the XYZ
port isn't being properly maintained it will be deleted from the
source tree.

If the maintainers are good, so will their port be; if not, it won't.
If OpenJDK is really to be open it has to be a *distributed* effort,
with porting, testing, and support done by independent workers.  The
Sun QE team can't so do it.

And yes, there will be bad ports out there.  But you can't stop that:
it's free software.  The question is whether to ignore the bad ports
or try to bring them inside the fold to help the maintainers turn them
into good ports.

Andrew.

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