IcedTea7 2.0 Branched for Release

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 14:05 Thu 29 Sep     , Matthias Klose wrote:
> On 09/29/2011 12:58 AM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> > IcedTea7 2.0 has now branched for release.  I plan to do the release
> > on Monday evening here in the UK, pending major issues.
> 
> I disagree.  If this release is needed for some deadline, then call it a
> pre-release.  

The pre-release is already available.  This release is already long
overdue and I want the first feature release out of the way prior to
the upcoming security update:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

There's also 7u2 coming soon and I don't really want to have restart testing
again due to importing all those changes.  The current tree has seen a lot
of testing, both by me and via the builds in Fedora.

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.

> There are still long outstanding issues.

Not that I'm aware of.

> 
>  - You did hijack release-management from existing release
>    maintainers, did change commit and release policies on
>    your own, and disallow others in editing these policies.
>    The request to change this behaviour is now ignored for
>    months [1].
> 

Frankly, that's a lie because there are several replies in that thread,
and contributions to the policy documents from other *active* developers.
Even back then, this was just a statement of the existing working model --
as you would know if you were actually involved in this project.

I presume by 'hijack[ing] release-management', you mean actually doing
the release work when such maintainers fail to do anything?  A situation
which would otherwise leave release branches with open security vulnerabilities?

As far as I can tell, your objection is to us actually *reviewing* release branch
patches (the only change I'm aware of), which means you can't just shove whatever
patches in you want in a rush because you failed to plan sufficient time for review.

>  - 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,
>    only a few more equal IcedTea developers have commit
>    rights, 

Everyone who has commit rights to the IcedTea trees can write to the forest.

>    the regression testers use the icedtea7 branch,

What is the issue with this???

>    and iiuc, people like Xerxes still have difficulties
>    or issues contributing to the icedtea7 forest.

Not as far as I know.

> 
>    Throwing over changes from the forest is not communicated,

I don't know what you're referring to by this.

>    and it does break alternate VMs on a more or less regular basis.

If you're interested in maintaining a non-standard build option like
Zero, Shark, CACAO and JamVM, you need to do actual work on it.  Xerxes
has done some excellent work in adding JamVM and keeping it up to date.
You can't expect other developers to maintain code they have no use for
on your behalf.

> 
>  - As communicated before, releases should be announced at
>    least a working week before the release, better two. Letting
>    people to have 1-2 work days before a release with the last
>    dump from the forest only two ore three days past is ridiculous
>    (and then having the release day on a bank holiday).

I wasn't aware Monday was a bank holiday; it's not in the UK and I don't have
the dates of every bank holiday in the world in my head.

Maybe Monday was a little eager, but this has been dragging on for a
long time and there's an impending security release.  Oracle released
7 at the end of July and there's demand from a number of quarters for
us to provide it as well.  Both Fedora and Gentoo are waiting on a new
release, for instance.

I'll push it back to Wednesday, giving the usual week as I believe I
always have.  Anything more and we risk mixing up a major feature release
with a security update.

>     If
>    you do have a deadline, cut a pre-release.  The time is
>    too short to even run tests on some architectures, or
>    even better to give time to address these.

This is a note to start *final release testing*, not to start testing period.
If you want to ship IcedTea7, you should have started testing it longer before
we reach this juncture.  It has been around for three years.

> 
> To go forward, I propose to set the release date to Mon, Oct 17 (or Tue, Oct 18
> if this is a bank holiday in the UK/US).  This also gives time to address the
> issues about commit and release policies.  

The release date will be Wednesday, October the 5th.  Suggesting the
week of the 18th just shows you're not only inactive in IcedTea
development, but also unaware of the security release process:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

There's not going to be any time in the early months of October, due
to preparing these security updates, and delaying to November means
that what we have now, which has been fairly well-tested, because more
and more outdated.

You haven't raised any actual *technical* issues above as far as I can
see, and I don't see any reason to delay this release by such a long
period.

> The project is still called IcedTea,
> not AndrewsTea.

It is. It's also not called MatthiasTea.  If I have a significant
voice in what goes on, it's because it's *me* who actually does a lot
of the work to make these things happen, from backporting patches,
fixing bugs and build issues to actually rolling out the releases
(around 30 I think in the last year).  In contrast, you haven't even
bothered to submit a single change to IcedTea7 since May.  You just
turn up about every six months, complain and then disappear again
without actually contributing anything.  This wasn't always the case,
and I would prefer to go back to a time when you were a welcome
presence in this project, rather than a troll.

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.

And to be honest, I don't blame them.  Try to find something positive to
say and contribute rather than just writing off the hard work of others.

> 
>   Matthias
> 
> [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/distro-pkg-dev/2011-May/014156.html
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

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

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