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

[Thomas Stüfe]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 12:05 PM, Andrew Dinn <adinn at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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).
>

I absolutely agree. The full history is indispensable for our work.

Best Regards, Thomas