IcedTea7 2.0 Branched for Release

[Damien Raude-Morvan]

Hi Andrew,

I won't comments on everything (since I'm kind of new comer to icedtea, I 
haven't followed everything) but I have to agree with some points of Matthias.

Le vendredi 30 septembre 2011 00:04:06, Dr Andrew John Hughes a écrit :
> I'm prepared to go to Wednesday to give it a full week, but my
> impression is that all bugs have been fixed at this stage.  Certainly,
> there are no longer any dependent bugs on
> http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=712 and that
> has been available since the 11th of May.

Yes, but, IIRC, you was still moving patches from icedtea7 to icedtea7-forest 
last week (or at least it was pushed to central repo last thurday...). For 
instance, I haven't yet had time to give a try to icedtea 2.0 pre-release... 
:/ Will try during this week...

[...]
> >  - The movement to the "forest" development model doesn't
> >    help many people, only a few.
> 
> This is the first complaint I've heard and the forest has been
> in use for over two years:
> 
> 2009-05-07  Andrew John Hughes  <ahughes at redhat.com>
> 
>         * Makefile.am:
> 	Support downloading and extracting from
>         the forest repositories rather than one megatarball.
> 
> >    It's not communicated,
[...]

I think that Matthias issue is not about forest in general (ie. like having 
option to use java.net openjdk7 or openjdk-bsd forest instead of official - 
outdated - tarball) but more about icedtea7-forest merged patches instead of 
individual patches in icedtea7.

> >    Throwing over changes from the forest is not communicated,
> 
> I don't know what you're referring to by this.

I can see two issues here :

1) technically there is no push notifications send on distro-pkg-dev for 
icedtea7-forest, so it's a bit complicated to follow what's going on.

2) this create some indirection to find out what's the change is about. For 
example, how the commit message is supposed to help :
-------
2011-07-28 Andrew John Hughes <ahughes at redhat.com>

Bring in new JDK build cleanups and
HotSpot fixes for Zero/Shark.
* Makefile.am:
(JDK_CHANGESET): Updated.
(JDK_SHA256SUM): Likewise.
(HOTSPOT_CHANGESET): Likewise.
(HOTSPOT_SHA256SUM): Likewise.
-------
I've have to manually diff between forest changeset to check what's going on.

I'm not against usage of forest to maintain icedtea7 patches, but at least I 
would have expected some RFC on public mailing list to weight pro and cons of 
this solution. Right now, from an outsider POV, I just see things happening 
without discussion and it makes me a little scared about how I should 
contribute to this project.

Another example of this kind of things is re-inclusion of JAXP and JAXWS 
directly inside forest source tree : while it is surely a valid change, I 
would have been fair to discussing this before...

[...]
> There's not only me working on IcedTea.  Pavel has done some excellent
> work finding backports and getting them into IcedTea6, as well as
> fixing tests.  I've had pretty much nothing to do with IcedTea-Web
> since the initial release; Deepak, Omair, Jiri and various others have
> done an excellent job of maintaining this.  They've also implemented a
> review policy for every patch (unlike IcedTea6+7 HEAD which don't
> require review) and have found it works better for them, leading to
> higher quality code.  If they're not vocal on the list, it's because
> they're actually hard at work actually contributing to this project,
> rather than just complaining, and don't want to get embroiled in
> ridiculous arguments like this.

For my point of view, Icedtea-Web works great because of this review policy, 
even for HEAD patches. It help for new comers to get a better overview of 
project current roadmap.

Regards,
-- 
Damien