Project Proposal: JDK 7 Update

[Mario Torre]

Il giorno ven, 17/06/2011 alle 10.08 +0200, Volker Simonis ha scritto:
> Hi Mark (R),
> 
> why so many words for  so simple things? My impression is that this
> discussion is just not honest from the Oracle part. Your work model
> for JDK 6 has always been to prepare update releases in separate,
> closed repositories and then, after they have been released, throw
> them over into the OpenJDK. And probably you want to keep this model
> for JDK7 as well. I'm not completely sure about the 'jdk' part, but
> this was definitely true for the HotSpotExpress repositories.
> 
> I don't want to criticise this working model at all. I understand that
> there are security holes which you don't want to disclose until they
> are actually fixed AND released (and there may be other stuff like
> Java for Buisness releases which you don't want to disclose as well).
> But for this working model it's easier to have separate trees for each
> update release and for me that's the single (and understandable)
> reason why you want to do it that way.
> 
> But then I suggest to just tell the people the truth and everybody
> will understand it instead of just beating around the bush.
> 
> Just my opinion,
> Volker

I firstly misunderstood the way this would have been implemented,
because (bad Oracle!) it wasn't communicated right in the first place I
guess...

But I believe you see conspiracy where there is none, after all, Oracle
has all the rights (both legally and morally) to have closed source
branches in my opinion, and this doesn't really impact much the open
developments, especially now that it seems that the true RI will be
OpenJDK and not the closed version.

I understood that the model would have been a branch for each release,
which host development for the next branch, which is not really very
well sustainable (but once again, there is nothing inherently wrong with
it either).

On the other end, I now seem to understand that the reality is a branch
for JDK development (jdk7u), from which you get release branches, but
the main development still happens in jdk7u, so in my opinion is just
lots of noise for nothing :)

Btw, it doesn't really change much if you get dev branches or not, if
Oracle wants to push for the closed development it can do it anyway, so
I really fail to see the point of your mail.

Cheers,
Mario

P.S. I hope things will happen in the open and I believe is correct to
push for this of course, I just don't see how this mail is related,
other than ask that this kind of discussion takes place in public next
time before getting the results of the proposal as a matter of fact.
However, in this specific case I believe there was just some
misunderstanding in the communication system.