Early access builds

[Kelly O'Hair]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi Kelly,
[snip]
> Sidenote (and the reason I send the original email): It certainly made
> me pause and decide not to use the nio2 early access builds to try and
> figure out what was wrong with the nio2 tests included in IcedTea or
> give any feedback. Damn, I thought, if this is how it has to be, then no
> cooperation! Luckily, Alan Bateman stands way above all this little
> bickering, so he contacted me, we went over all the failures I saw in my
> build, and he personally explained each and every one away. Go Alan!

Yes, Go Alan. ;^)

[snip]

I understand.

> 
> So, I think that what we really need is rules for OpenJDK projects that
> want to publish Early Access build artifacts. IMHO if they do, they
> should do that in accordance to the rules that everybody needs to
> follow, which are spelled out at http://openjdk.java.net/legal/
> That is the only fair thing to do.

I have no disagreement here. I think we can fix this. Probably about time
anyway.

And to be clear, in my opinion, any 'open' build published should be one
built without the binary plugs, I would very much like for them to die,
be buried, and be forgotten.

Effectively what I'm thinking is a kind of cleanroom build of an openjdk
forest, using Fedora 9 X86 32bit, and OpenSolaris X86 32bit to start.
I'll create a simple self-extracting tarball installer (no rpm/deb/ips packages),
and publish them in a public openjdk area.
No testing to start, but adding testing with published results could
be done by just about anyone.
If I do this right, we can in theory point at any openjdk project forest
and provide the same build service for any project.

Granted, I think anyone in the community could probably do the same
thing, and I'm happy to step aside for someone else to do it, whatever,
but let's get something done here.

Assuming I'm not fired or sent to Iraq for sticking my neck out on this,
does this sound like a reasonable start?

-kto