IcedTea release process

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Matthias Klose wrote:
> 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.
>
>   

Hello.

FYI, for comparison purposes I've been posting per-build OpenJDK 6 jtreg 
results on my blog, along with differences from the previous build; for 
example,
    http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/openjdk_6_some_regression_test2

-Joe