IcedTea release process

[Matthias Klose]

Gary Benson schrieb:
> Hi all,
> 
> Given the recent friction about the current IcedTea release process
> (such as it is) I'd like to start a discussion about what to do for
> the future.  We don't have to resolve anything now, but we can at
> least we start to figure out what the issues are in time to discuss
> it "properly" with beer at FOSDEM.
> 
> So, firstly, are formal releases beneficial?  Who uses them?
> 
>  - Lillian and Matthias, do you exclusively use the release tarballs,
>    or do you sometimes (or most times) use ones you cut yourself.

I never use the release tarballs, however I do build and upload at least
packages matching the IcedTea revision of the release. In the past when Ubuntu
enters some kind of freeze I build another package, check for regressions, and
upload package if there are no regressions. Debian is a bit different here in
that Debian is in a freeze now, and it is difficult to regression test on all
architectures where it is currently built (the experimental buildds are not
always a help).

>    Would it be easier for you guys to just cut your own tarballs
>    and call them icedtea6-c29bbfa41f2b.tar.gz or whatever?

I currently don't use the icedtea versioning for the packages. Once a
openjdk-6_6b14.orig.tar.gz package (consisting of the openjdk and hotspot
tarballs and an IcedTea snapshot) is uploaded it is not possible to change this
in the archives. All following IcedTea changes are made in the
openjdk-6_6b14-<release number>.diff.gz which holds the packaging changes as
well (you can identify the build, if you did configure IcedTea --with-pkgversion).

Having a release tested is worthwhile, because people do try to build distro XY
and are disappointed if the build doesn't succeed.

>  - Are there other distro maintainers out there?  What about you?
> 
>  - How about end users?  Do we particularly have any, or do most
>    people just use built packages?  Can we get web server statistics
>    to see if people are downloading the tarballs?
> 
> My personal opinion is that formal releases are a good idea (even
> if if nobody uses them) because if nothing else they give us a semi-
> regular excuse to blog all over the place about how great we are :)
> Also, IcedTea is far bigger now than it was this time last year.
> It's the default Java implementation on Fedora, and I guess Ubuntu
> and Debian too, which maps out to a lot of unhappy people if we break

not yet on Debian (still gcj/ecj, openjdk-6 available), and AFAIU ecj is still
used on Fedora to build the packages (?).

> something.  The fact that a single TCK failure puts you right back
> to the beginning means some kind of pre-release freeze is probably
> a good idea even if it's only for a couple of days.

It would be nice to have test results of the jtreg testsuite posted to some
place (maybe not this list). These tests are publically available and test
results can be shared.

  Matthias