JDK Enhancement-Proposal & Roadmap Process -- DRAFT

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

Returning to a thread I started back in March [1], I've written up and
posted the first draft of a process for collecting, reviewing, sorting,
and recording the results of proposals for enhancements to the JDK and
for related efforts, such as process and infrastructure improvements.

As a reminder, here are the goals:

  - As lightweight as possible.

  - Simple mechanics.

  - Version-controlled, so that changes can be tracked.

  - Open to all Committers, with transparent decision-making.

  - The basic format should not be too different from (a simplified
    form of) the old Sun "one-pager" template [2], with which many
    are already familiar.

  - An approved proposal should be able to serve as the authoritative
    source of the summary and reference information needed for related
    documents such as the release feature list [3] and the Platform
    Umbrella JSR specification [4].

There are three documents:

  - Process definition
      http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jep/jep-process.html
  - Proposal template
      http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jep/jep-template
  - Example proposal
      http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/jep/draft-mcimadamore-inference-01.md

This draft has been reviewed by just a few people so far; my thanks to
Brian Goetz, Paul Hohensee, Georges Saab, and Mikael Vidstedt for their
feedback.  Acknowledgement is also due to the Python community, from
whose PEP process [5] many useful ideas were adopted.

If you have comments or suggestions on this draft then please send them
in a public reply to this message by Thursday 7 July 2011.  I'd like to
put this process in place shortly thereafter.

    NOTE: This is not a solicitation for specific proposals!
          That will come later, after this process is in place.

- Mark


[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/discuss/2011-March/001704.html
[2] http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+arc/onepager
[3] E.g., http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/
[4] E.g., http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=336
[5] http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0001/