Feedback request: OpenJDK Community Innovator's Challenge Grants

[Dalibor Topic]

Ray Gans schrieb:
> - Proposals will be accepted until March 3, 2008. At this time the 
> proposals will be judged by a team of people (we're thinking 2 from 
> Sun and 3 from outside Sun). We're also thinking of accepting only 
> seven or less proposals.
I don't think the affiliation and number of the judges matters much, 
they just need to have the necessary technical background with OpenJDK 
to be able to evaluate the feasibility of proposals
in the given time frame, and at this point in time, that's mostly going 
to be developers from Sun, anyway.
> Scope and Constraints
> - What kind of projects do you think would be valuable to the OpenJDK 
> community?
* Making the windows build easier, for example by making it work on a 
plain Cygwin installation with gcc/g++. That would allow
  more developers using Windows to get past the initial barrier, and is 
a bit of a recurring topic on the build list.
* Making openjdk cross-compileable. May involve using autotools for a 
skeleton overlay build system.
* OpenJDK janitors (a la Kerneljanitors) to clean up 
findbugs/pmd/javac/ecj/* & easy bug database issues.
* Eclipse project env to mirror the Netbeans one. Make the native code 
bits hackable in the IDEs, too.
* openjdk gump instance / tinderbox/buildbot setup / other automated 
regression testing infrastructure
* JSR 277 / JSR 291 bridge & teaching JRepo about other repository 
formats (Debian, Fedora, Maven, etc.)
* Create an installable prototype of the modules project's work that 
doesn't require binary plugs to build / make the current code work on JDK6.
* Projects proposed by existing groups
> - How many proposals should be accepted?
Since I'd expect those projects to (need to) work without much 
mentoring, and the results from google summer of code
are usually mixed in terms of what ends up being merged in and 
maintained upstream, I'd say the more the merrier.

(I say 'need to' as I expect that the Sun devs will be extremely busy 
with J1 preparations in the months before May, and
will probably all disappear into a well deserved vacation afterwards.)

cheers,
dalibor topic