Project Proposal: JDK 7 Update

[Volker Simonis]

Sorry, I apologize if my mail was to rude or questioned the integrity
of anybody on this list. I definitely didn't wanted to hurt anybody.

I'm just not very satisfied with how the things are going with the HSX
repositories compared to the HS versions in the official Oracle JDK
and wanted to prevent this situation for the JDK 7 update releases. If
my fears are without cause - that's just great!

See my further comments inline:

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Mario Torre
<neugens.limasoftware at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

As you can read in Henriks blog at
http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the : "The
RI is built once when the specification is finalized and not touched
again (no updates, no patches, no security fixes)...". So in my
opinion there will be an impact for on the 'open development' as you
call it if you don't get updates, patches, security fixes, ...

But according to the ongoing discussion on this thread, that just what
the update repositories are for. So lets hope all will work smoothly:)

> 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.
>

Just have look at he HSX (HotSpot express) repositories on
hg.openjdk.java.net/ and compare the changesets there with the
changesets which went into the HSX version in the official Oracle
JDK6uXX versions
(http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/releasenotes-136954.html).
The difference that you'll notice is exactly the point of my 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.
>
>
>