Source tarballs

[Dalibor Topic]

Tom Marble wrote:
> Andreas Sterbenz wrote:
>   
>> Xiomara Jayasena wrote:
>>     
>>> We really didn't see the need, hence we decided to get rid of them. 
>>> It seems anyone working in JDK 7 may need to become familiar with hg
>>> -- that said I appreciate your input.  Here at Sun we will no longer
>>> be using the tarred source and expect engineers to do clones and that
>>> is the same expectation for developers outside of Sun.   If many
>>> people think this is crucial then the decision can be re-evaluated.
>>>       
>> It is still possible to get source tarballs - by going to
>> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/ . Just click on the zip/gz/bz2 link next to
>> the desired repository to get the tip (e.g.
>> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/archive/tip.tar.bz2) or navigate to
>> the changeset or tag you like and follow the download link (e.g.
>> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/rev/0a5c5386a678).
>>
>> The only thing it doesn't do is understand forests, so you have to
>> download the source for each of the seven repositories in the forest
>> separately (/if/ you really want them all).
>>     
>
> I'd like to ask if we (Sun) can reconsider publishing one (1)
> source tarball for promoted builds.
>
> This question has come up in the past in the context of many
> Free Software distro build daemons which proscribe live Internet
> access during binary builds.  Usually there is a "source package"
> which is uploaded to the build daemon which specifies any build
> time dependencies (e.g. specific compilers, header file packages)
> and includes the upstream tarball(s).
>
> This question came up again, today, on IRC in the context of
> building OpenJDK for stable distros.  Developers stated that it
> is very desirable for non-root users to be able to build OpenJDK
> on stable distros by making only one simple request to their
> system administrator for a list of build dependency packages.
> While the user may have Internet access she cannot specify
> packages which were not part of the stable release.
That makes sense, and usually having some easy way to get the source 
code for particular
snapshots without requiring the installation of a VCS is a nice thing 
for redistributors, build
daemons, etc. The gcc project, for example, publishes weekly snapshots, 
which are then
made available from GNU mirrors like

ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/gcc/snapshots/

as regular tar.bz2 archives.

cheers,
dalibor topic