How to host HS14 stable? (Was: RFC: Change name of default HotSpot to 'default')

[Volker Simonis]

As far as I understand the procedure, the HS14 has been branched at
some time in the past and is now "stabilized" in an Sun-internal
repository in order to become the next, officially released "Express"
VM for JDK6.

A good starting point for what you want (i.e. an open, stable HS14
repository) would be to know the exact point at which the HS14 was
branched for the next JDK 6 express release. I'm not sure this was
right before the HS number was bumped to 15.

If it would then also be possible to track the fixes for Sun's
"stabilization" branch, you could easily maintain an open, stabilized
HS14 branch yourself. By the way, the bugs which are identified for
Sun's "stabilization" branch are already visible in the bug database
today, although they are not easy to find. The problem is, that some
of the bugs are reported and fixed against the JDK 7 head revisions
and only back ported to the "stabilization" branch if they are
regarded critical.

Consider for example bug 6661247. It was fixed in  hs12(b02) which was
the development code line at that time. But there's another bug ID for
the same bug (2160622) and it states the bug was also fixed in
hs11(b12) which was a "stabilization" branch at that time.
Unfortunately there's no link from 6661247 to 2160622. A nicer example
id probably 6599425. It lists all the parallel bug IDs and releases
where the bug has been fixed ( hs12(b02), hs10(b22) (Bug ID:2158279) ,
hs11(b12) (Bug ID:2158280) , 6-open(b11) (Bug ID:2164154)). I think
this is exactly  the kind of information, that is required - and it
should be browsable and searchable release-wise (i.e. by the HS
release number).

Regards,
Volker

On 2/17/09, Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp.org> wrote:
> Hi Christian (CCed hotspot-dev for advice)
>
>  On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:55 +0100, Christian Thalinger wrote:
>  > On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:25 +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote:
>  > > Great. I was surprised if it was otherwise.
>  > > I was just confused which tree to track to make sure to get the latest
>  > > HS14 since we are trying to keep all branches (zero/shark/default) of
>  > > IcedTea6 at a stable Hotspot release. Is this in the default
>  > > jdk7/jdk7/hotspot tree or in some other one?
>  >
>  > The jdk7 repository contains HS15 and therefore not a stable one.  I
>  > just looked into the jdk6 repository but it only contains HS11.  I don't
>  > know of any open HS14 repository off the top of my head.
>
>  So it would be good to have an open repo that hosts the HS14 stable
>  build so that people interested in a stable, but modern, hotspot could
>  base their work on that. Since IcedTea6 is trying to standardize on HS14
>  for the default hotspot and the one that Zero and Shark are based on I
>  could create a icedtea/hotspot repo branched from the latest HS14 code
>  in the jdk7/jdk7/hotspot repo. Would that be interesting to others? How
>  do we coordinate backporting fixes to it? Any other suggestions for
>  hosting an open hotspot HS14 repo (maybe as subtree of one of the other
>  6 hotspot repos under jdk7/hostspot-* (I admit to not know what they are
>  all for currently).
>
>  Thanks,
>
>
>  Mark
>
>