Call for Discussion: New Project: Skara -- investigating source code management options for the JDK sources

joe darcy joe.darcy at oracle.com
Fri Jul 27 03:42:12 UTC 2018


Hello,

The source code management (SCM) system of a software project is a 
fundamental piece of its infrastructure and workflows. Starting in 
February 2008, the source code of different JDK releases and supporting 
projects has been hosted in Mercurial repositories under 
http://hg.openjdk.java.net/. Code reviews of JDK changes are typically 
conducted as discussions in mailing lists over small patches sent to one 
or more lists or over webrevs hosted on cr.openjdk.java.net. Since 2008, 
many open source projects have successfully adopted more efficient SCM 
and review tooling, in some cases provided by third parties.

In order to help OpenJDK contributors be more productive, both seasoned 
committers and relative newcomers, the Skara project proposes to 
investigate alternative SCM and code review options for the JDK source 
code, including options based upon Git rather than Mercurial, and 
including options hosted by third parties.

The Skara project intends to build prototypes of hosting the JDK 12 
sources under different providers.

The evaluation criteria to consider include but are not limited to:

     * Performance: time for clone operations from master repos, time of 
local operations, etc.

     * Space efficiency

     * Usability in different geographies

     * Support for common development environments such as Linux, Mac, 
and Windows

     * Able to easily host the entire history of the JDK and the 
projected growth of its history over the next decade

     * Support for general JDK code review practices

     * Programmatic APIs to enable process assistance and automation of 
review and processes

If one or more prototypes indicate a different SCM arrangement offers 
substantial improvements over the current situation, the Skara project 
will shepherd a JEP to change the SCM for the JDK.

I propose to lead the project with the initial reviewers including but 
not limited to Tim Bell (tbell), Erik Duveblad (ehelin), Erik Joelsson 
(erikj), Tiep Vo (tiep), Tony Squier (squierts), and Robin Westberg 
(rwestberg).

We suggest the build group sponsor this work.

Changing the bug tracking system is out of scope for this project and is 
*not* under consideration.

Comments?

Cheers,

-Joe



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