official 'porters' group

[Kurt Miller]

Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Kurt Miller wrote:
>> Myself and Jung-uk Kim have completed making the plugin 64-bit
>> clean for the 1.6 JRL licensed plugin. You can find our work in patchset
>> 2 for BSD:
>>
>> http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/JDK16JRLConfirm.html
>>   
> On an unrelated note, would it make sense to create infrastructure for
> the porting projects inside OpenJDK? I am wondering if we shouldn't
> create an official 'porters' group, with projects for ports to *BSD, etc.
> 
> 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.

Yes the *BSD porting team would like to have our work incorporated
upstream at Sun. If it must be keep in separate branch at first
or for longer term that is ok too.

I'm not familiar with mercurial at all. We've been using cvs. The
JDK src is imported into vendor branches, changes are made to
support the BSD's and then patchsets are cut by doing diffs
against the original src in the vendor branch. In the end we
need either a patchset off official Sun sources or a complete
source distribution that includes our changes. So long as
mercurial can accomplish those needs it would work for us.

Regarding the questions about quality: At least compatibility
can be maintained if the JavaTest Harness, the JCK tests and
documentation are available to the members of the porters
group. I think people are going to be surprised at how well
Java support on BSD's measures up - especially OpenBSD and FreeBSD
which has the most active participants.

Regards,
-Kurt