New IcedTea6 major release (1.7)

[Mark Wielaard]

On Thu, 2009-12-10 at 17:29 +0000, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> I notice we haven't had a major IcedTea6 release since 1.6 in
> September.  I think it's time to at least consider when we want to do
> so.

Yes, definitely has been too long since there has been a new release.

> My personal preference would be to wait at least until b18, which will
> include the Nimbus backport.  Nimbus is one of the major areas (if not
> only) where OpenJDK still lags the proprietary Sun JDK.  The release
> is fairly imminent; we've been discussing it at some length on
> jdk6-dev: http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2009-December/000984.html
>  However, I understand that others may want to delay this until 1.8 if
> a 1.7 is desired sooner, prior to extensive testing of b18.

I like early and often. I don't mind waiting a bit longer, but there is
nothing wrong with doing a quick release now and then do another in a
few weeks.

> What other features would people like to see in a release?  What
> things are we waiting on?  The new plugin springs to mind.

Stuff I have been working on that is already in is the hotspot jni
tapset support. Jon has been writing some scripts using that, so that is
nicely tested already. Might be nice to have some of those example
scripts also in the distro, Jon? But they can be shipped later
separately also.

The other stuff I have been working on is the systemtap jstack support I
posted about last week. I think that is basically ready, but it needs a
new systemtap release to be usable. It just doesn't work (although the
build will be fine) with older systemtap releases. It also could be
added/used separately (as long as icedtea is build with configure
--enable-systemtap). So it isn't really release critical.

Cheers,

Mark