Heads Up: JDK 7 Linux platforms moving to Fedora 9

[Kelly O'Hair]

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On 23/11/2008, Martin Buchholz <martinrb at google.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 17:31, Andrew John Hughes
>>  <gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:
>>
>>  > Well F10 is out on Tuesday so choosing F9 seems strange...
>>
>>
>> Andrew, you appear to live in a different world from the rest of us.
>>  Operating systems generally try to be backward compatible,
>>  so from my point of view using Fedora 9 seems offhand very aggressive.
>>  My rule of thumb was to build production binaries on the oldest
>>  systems you are willing to support.  What developers should use is
>>  a different story.
>>
> 
> Not really.  If you're saying you want the oldest system while still
> maintaining reasonably close to the majority of systems in general
> use, then yes I agree F9 is aggressive, as I'd like to know the build
> isn't going to be unknowingly broken in really bad ways on current
> Debian stable or RHEL 4/5, both of which are much older (though Debian
> stable will soon become a more recent release).
> 
>  I was reading it as where do we want to do test builds to ensure we
> catch the new issues that are going to arise.  Apparently there are
> already issues building with the new Ubuntu release due to a
> backported gcc 4.4 patch, but I haven't been able to verify this as I
> don't have software installed that is so bleeding edge ;)
> 
> I don't see why anyone other than developers or prospective developers
> would be building OpenJDK.  Actual users would find it much easier
> just using the package for their distro and you'll find one in Fedora,
> Ubuntu, Debian and (with some work) RHEL and Gentoo.
> 
>>  > But I don't get the point of this mail anyway.  OpenJDK already builds
>>  > fine on F9 and F10 for me.
>>
>>
>> It is of great interest to me.  In future, if my build is broken,
>>  I will first ask, "How is my system different from Fedora 9?".
>>
>>
> 
> Then should we be posting successful build testimonials here? Would
> that help? My own builds and blogs I've seen by others suggest builds
> on a variety of GNU/Linux platforms over and above just F9.
> 
>>  Martin
>>
> 

I would hope that all users would get the built OpenJDK from the distro,
that is definitely the right answer in my book.
That gets them the custom bits built for that system.
I would also hope that only developers (or the distro builders) would be
having to actually "build" OpenJDK7.

The Sun JDK has traditionally been built and tested on one Linux system,
then those built bits are installed and extreme tested (very detailed and
long running tests) on a set of Linux systems defined by the testing group
and the release support matrix. With each release of the Sun JDK we would
revisit this list and the selected build system (which impacts the support matrix).
The build systems would then be nailed down for each release, including every
bit on them.
It is that Sun JDK build system that has advanced to Fedora 9 for JDK7, and
consequently the list of Linux systems getting extreme testing will change too,
the details of that remain to be seen.

How does that impact OpenJDK7? As you say, not much, but it does
tell you that we will be hitting it hard with Fedora 9.
Does this risk the builds on other Linux systems any more than the current
antique Linux systems we are using? Probably not, but we really don't know.

If we had a rack of hardware or set of vmware images that contained every
possible Linux&gcc combination, I suppose we could constantly monitor all
OpenJDK builds... but some scary system administration thoughts are popping
into my head :^{

-kto