Sun JDK vs OpenJDK - Sun JRE vs OpenJDK JRE

[Dalibor Topic]

Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> But "Java 7" was the Java 6 code, right?  
As far as I know, SE 6 was branched off some time before OpenJDK.
> why would 6 come after 7?
The necessary legal reviews, etc. have been done on the code trunk that
is used going forward into 7, i.e. on OpenJDK.

Not on the maintenance branch for SE 6.

So accordingly, it only made sense to branch OpenJDK 6 from OpenJDK 7,
instead of redoing all the work on opening
up the SE 6 maintenance branch.
> iced-tea lists?
OpenJDK mailing lists. There are plenty of them, the IcedTea development
takes place on distro-pkg-dev, and patches
destined to go upstream head into specific project lists for review, and
merge into OpenJDK repositories.
> So what happens when something in IcedTea needs to go back into OpenJDK?  
It gets submitted to the corresponding project's mailing list for review
(for example the build-dev mailing list for build patches),
gets reviewed, and if the SCA isn't signed, the submitter signs the SCA
and then the patch eventually goes in.
> Has that actually happened?
It happens regularly, yes, of course. Please see the release notes for
OpenJDK 6 builds for details.
> But then if they're doing it "over there", how does that make them
> part of the community "over here"?
IcedTea development mailing list is the OpenJDK mailing list
distro-pkg-dev. The bugzilla and mercurial server
used by IcedTea are not hosted by OpenJDK though, they have been created
before OpenJDK had corresponding
infrastructure in place (and the bugzilla instance is not there yet, for
example). A lot of IcedTea development also
makes its way into the upstream OpenJDK 6 builds, so it goes out on
corresponding OpenJDK project mailing lists.

I know this sounds very confusing to people used to drawing gates around
communities - the squishy concept
of a community of communities around a shared backbone is something that
OpenJDK has adopted from GNU
Classpath, where it has worked really nicely to enable permeable
development.
> Is there a certified, non-sun java se impl yet?
The Fedora 9 binaries on x86 and amd64 have passed the SE 6 TCK.
Sun doesn't control what goes into those binaries, the Fedora community
does,
and obviously does it quite successfully.

cheers,
dalibor topic

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