Release Schedule

[Andrew John Hughes]

I have a number of new IcedTea releases in planning:

* IcedTea6 1.6 branch:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea6-1.6/shortlog/

There will be a 1.6.3 release as the branch has a lot of patches not
yet released including security updates.  It is ready for testing now.
 I have a few more patches to look into, but it's otherwise ready.
doko reported an issue with Zero a while back, but I've not heard
anything since.

* IcedTea6 1.7 branch:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea6-1.7/shortlog/

There will be a 1.7.4 release to update the plugin with recent bug
fixes in 1.8 and beyond.  This will be a plugin-only release.  Most of
the patches have been backported (up to 1.8) and so this is also
eligible for testing now.

* IcedTea7: http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea/shortlog

There will be based on b89 (Milestone 7).  I see from
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/milestones/ that we've
apparently just reached Milestone 8, but I've seen nothing from Oracle
on either milestone 6, 7 or 8 and I don't believe 8 is feature
complete; I've seen no commits relating to closures for one thing.  As
you may have seen from the IcedTea7 commits, I've been backporting
over six months worth of work on IcedTea6 to IcedTea7 over the last
few weeks.  There's still some to go, so I'll let the list know when
it's worth testing.   But it should be soon.

A couple of changes I plan for this release are updating the CACAO
build to use the development branch: see
http://server.complang.tuwien.ac.at/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139
and dropping VisualVM, which I believe is broken anyway.  VisualVM
will be migrated to its own repository.

I'd like to make the same VisualVM change with IcedTea6 HEAD in due
course.  As to IcedTea6 HEAD generally, I don't think we're ready for
another release yet so I doubt we'll have a release based on b19.  The
only major change there was an upgrade to hs16, which we provided as
an option in 1.8 anyway.  I'd rather we wait for b20 and then begin
preparing a release, stabilising on hs17, which will bring us in line
with the proprietary JDK6.

For 1.8, I will backport any plugin fixes that are post-1.8 as I do
them for 1.7, but I'll leave releases up to the release manager, doko.

Comments welcome and testing encouraged,
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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