Making OpenJDK builds easier

[Henri Gomez]

> Hello all,
>
> I'd like to bring up the topic of the ease of building the OpenJDK.
>
> Let me start with a bit of background. I attended an interesting OpenJDK
> talk by Dalibor at Devoxx 2010 earlier this month and decided I should check
> out the OpenJDK project. This of course meant grabbing the source code and
> building it!
>
> 1) Grabbing the code
> I immediately found info on how to install Mercurial and clone the Mercurial
> repo on openjdk.org. The Achilles heel here is of course the Forest
> extension. The main problem I had was finding Forest since the original
> Forest repo is no longer available (http://hg.akoha.org/hgforest/).
>
> [Rant] This whole Forest deal feels a bit amateurish. Since Forest seems to
> be a discontinued project maybe the OpenJDK project should just grab control
> of it and let users download forest.py directly from openjdk.org itself?
> That would also allow the Forest installation instructions on openjdk.org to
> be simpler and more to the point [/Rant]
>
> 2) Building the code
> Again I quickly found the "OpenJDK Build README" on openjdk.org
> (http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/build/raw-file/tip/README-builds.html) and
> prepped my system for a build. Doing 'make sanity' told me everything was
> fine, so I tried 'make'. This runs into a problem because the build needs to
> download jaxp/jaxws/jaf code drops from the Internet and this is not allowed
> by default. After a bit of googling I issued a 'make ALLOW_DOWNLOADS=true'
> command. Next problem: the java.net download locations in the build system
> are fubar. After a bit more googling and investigation I patched two
> properties files (see attached patch) and now 'make ALLOW_DOWNLOADS=true'
> created my first OpenJDK 7 build!
>
> [Rant] That problem with the java.net download locations should obviously be
> fixed (maybe the attached patch can be my first OpenJDK contribution ;-)
> Secondly, the "OpenJDK Build README" should mention the ALLOW_DOWNLOADS
> flag, or maybe ALLOW_DOWNLOADS should even be "true" by default. [/Rant]
>
>
> My 2c:
> The process of grabbing the source code and making your first OpenJDK should
> be as simple as possible. Making this super simple makes getting into
> OpenJDK hacking much more pleasant since you don't get bogged down in a
> bunch of stupid issues right from the start.

Hi Erwin,

I've setup a continuous build with Hudson using scripts available on
my Google Code project, http://code.google.com/p/openjdk-osx-build/

These scripts take care of jaxp/jaxws/jaf and many others things,
primary for OS/X, but you could get them to make your own continuous
build for OpenJDK.
What's your target OS ?