jtreg testing integrated

[Andrew John Hughes]

>  >  Yes, getting accurate, descriptive, and neutral (and concise) wording can
>  > be tricky, as "proprietary" is also disparaging in some contexts ;-)
>  >
>
>
> Er... it's very much intended to be disparaging.  There's a good basis
>  for that, whereas I don't see one for simply classifying all other
>  builds as below the standard of this 'production build' -- well,
>  outside Sun anyway :)
>

It occurred to me I should probably clarify this a little more, and
the rest of the discussion with a little context.

OpenJDK is pretty much the first extended content I and many other GNU
Classpath/GCJ/etc. developers have had with Sun's JDK.  Prior to this,
if it was used at all, it would be to run a simple test case because
the output differed between the Classpath implementation and Sun's
reference implementation.  Certainly no-one who worked on these
projects will have seen the source code; this is a pre-requisite for
this work.

This is still very much the case; with the use of IcedTea you are
seeing a switch not from shipping Sun's proprietary JDK but from
shipping a variety of Classpath-based solutions.  The proprietary JDK
doesn't really enter into the mainstream of most distributions such as
Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu.  If it's packaged at all, it lurks in a
separate repository for non-Free packages.

Thus, I get a little alarmed when I read comments about special cases
being added to the GPLed implementation to handle issues with the
proprietary JDK.  This is not because this is inherently wrong, but
simply because I can foresee this causing additional problems or
inconveniences for those who are now packaging and shipping OpenJDK.
Indeed, I believe Mark started looking into this specifically for this
reason; so that the tests could be run on the OpenJDK being packaged
in distributions and so the community could have a goal to work
towards in fixing any issues.

So I apologise if any of my comments read as being abrasive or as not
understanding the issues of Sun's 'production build'.  But it's
something very foreign to us, and something I'd expect to remain so,
while the production build remains a proprietary product.
-- 
Andrew :-)

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