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

[Andrew Dinn]

On 30/07/18 10:17, Roman Kennke wrote:
 <snip>
> Yes. And we can make partial clones. Nobody really ever needs all of the history.
No no no!

There have been quite a few occasions in the last year when I really
needed to search all of the history (yes, even taking me back to jdk7 in
some cases). Indeed, for AArch64 -- which was upstreamed into jdk9 in
one great big lump -- I have returned to the downstream jdk8 repo to
find out when and how something was inserted into that history.

The full history is fairly obviously a major concern while we still need
to backport security fixes. So, yes, it is critical that we can continue
to identify what went into jdk7 when for several years to come. However,
that's not the only case. My experience has been that full history is
occasionally vital to understanding how something arose when I want to
work out what to do about it now. It is all very well asking the
relevant old-timers about why things happened but the repo has a better
memory for important details (as my experience with the AArch64 code
made very clear to me).

regards,


Andrew Dinn
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Senior Principal Software Engineer
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