preparing a icedtea-1.3 release?

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 00:08 Mon 29 Sep     , Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> On Sun, 2008-09-28 at 22:25 +0100, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> > > I would like to get the better version reporting in that you and andrew
> > > suggested. Andrew already has something in icedtea[7].
> > > 
> > With 7 it currently gives:
> > 
> > java version "1.7.0_0"
> > IcedTea 1.8-pre-r1226 Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_0-b36)
> > OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.7.0_0-b36, mixed mode)
> > 
> > Releases built from a tarball would simplify to just IcedTea 1.8 (for example).
> > The revision is automatically picked up if the source directory is a Mercurial
> > repository, and the other part is taken from configure.
> > 
> > The other related patch adds support for a custom version tag giving:
> > 
> > $ java -version
> > java version "1.6.0-gentoo"
> > IcedTea6 1.2 Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0-gentoo-b09)
> > OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0-b09, mixed mode)
> > 
> > (I applied the patch to the Gentoo ebuilds for IcedTea6)
> >
> > IcedTea6, unlike IcedTea7, seems to have dropped using IcedTea at all
> > in favour of OpenJDK, which I feel is confusing, given we are patching
> > the resulting build so much.
> 
> Yes, we need the extra version/name to avoid confusion and to get better
> bug reports. There has been some confusion in the past because a) we
> reused the bxx number for different releases and b) a distro might have
> backported a patch already.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Mark
> 

Yes, this is exactly what I considered when writing the patches.  I
posted the output here so people could discuss the results and any
problems before we commit this to the IcedTea6 tree as well.

Including the Mercurial revision gives us a version of IcedTea down to
the commit.  I would suggest that distros and the like adding changes beyond
what's in the repository or a particular released version add an additional
tag (e.g. 'gentoo' above) so we at least know we are not working with a
vanilla IcedTea install.

Both concepts have been common practice with GCC for some time AFAIK.

$ gcc --version
gcc (Gentoo 4.3.9999 p1.1) 4.3.3 20080924 (prerelease)

$ /home/andrew/build/gcj/bin/gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.4.0 20080913 (experimental) [gcj/classpath-098-merge-branch revision 140651]

-- 
Andrew :)

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