icedtea7 releases (was Re: RFC: backport S7104625 to icedtea7 forest)

[Omair Majid]

On 12/12/2011 06:11 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>> If you need this fix earlier, I can add this to icedtea7 as well. Though
>> I would rather avoid the extra work and just wait until the next sync :)
>>
>
> I think this is something we need to discuss.  I've not had much luck finding
> out the schedule for these updates from Oracle.  From
>
> http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/builds/
>
> it seems that u2 is supposed to be released tomorrow, but I see little discussion
> about this on the jdk7u mailing list.  There are no dates on that calendar for
> future releases.
>
> We should look at pulling u2 into IcedTea7 and doing a 2.1 release.  I'll post a
> list of changesets to see what this equates to.
>
> We also need to discuss how we are going to handle such updates generally.
> As we don't even know when u4 is going to appear, it may be judicious to backport
> this particular changeset ourselves to IcedTea7.
>

I would like to add my thoughts to this discussion.

First, I think it would be beneficial to keep version numbers as close 
to openjdk/proprietary jdk as possible. It was quite strange in the 
openjdk6 time-frame where the openjdk (6bXX) releases were not related 
to proprietary jdk6 (6uYY) at all. I recall a number of users saying 
that because YY was greater than XX, openjdk was lagging behind the 
proprietary jdk. I imagine it will be hard for users to figure out that 
icedtea2.1 is approximately openjdk7u2, and not openjdk7u1. Perhaps we 
can even utilize this to our advantage and keep odd minor numbers (2.1, 
2.3, 2.5 and so on) reserved for our own releases which may contain 
important non-openjdk stuff (I am thinking of things like ports, 
architecture support, a number of important bug fixes. and so on).

Second, it might be nice to have releases as close to openjdk as 
possible. That way we ensure that when people go looking for the latest 
openjdk7 update version, they find icedtea7 and don't use the closed 
source jdk instead. This will also minimize the period in which known 
bugs are fixed in the (proprietary) openjdk7 update release but the 
fixes are not available in icedtea7. I know the lack of an explicit 
openjdk7 release schedule does not help right now, but perhaps this will 
be addressed soon?

What do others think?

Cheers,
Omair