Not Seeing the Forests for the Trees

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

Hi all,

As IcedTea7 is now nearing its first proper release (2.0), its use of a forest
for patches, as opposed to our previous method of using a patches directory
in IcedTea, is becoming more of an issue and a change in the way we operate.

One of the aims for 2.0 is to have all non-bootstrap patches in the forest:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=717

Using the forest works pretty much the same as our previous method in most
cases, with the added advantage that patching is done once only and not
on every build.  You can use 'hg log' to find out what patches have
been applied and 'hg out' to an OpenJDK6 checkout will show up which
patches aren't upstream.

Just as we currently do with release branches, the plan
is to create a release forest to correspond to IcedTea release branches,
and the usual backport process applies there.

The main issue with this process is that bringing new patches into IcedTea7
requires bumping the changeset ID, which can mean bringing in other people's
changes as well as your own.  This came up today with Pavel.

One possible solution I've thought of for this is to have a 'changeset guardian'
role.  Instead of each person bumping the changeset ID(s) themselves, they send
a request to the changeset guardian, along with a patch containing any ancillary
changes needed to IcedTea (e.g. new options passed to make).  Think of it like
using a print server to submit print jobs to the printer, rather than everyone
trying to send their jobs at the same time.  What do people think of this idea?
Does anyone want to volunteer to be the changeset guardian?

I've also been thinking we should go the same route for IcedTea6.  I was going to
propose this once 1.11 branched off, as a change in 1.12, but given the silence
on jdk6-dev (e.g. http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2011-July/thread.html
is still unanswered), maybe we should do this sooner rather than later.  It won't
be until after IcedTea7 2.0 at any rate, so in the meantime let me know what you think.
-- 
Andrew :)

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

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and IcedTea
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://icedtea.classpath.org
PGP Key: F5862A37 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EA30 D855 D50F 90CD F54D  0698 0713 C3ED F586 2A37