Supporting IcedTea7

[Deepak Bhole]

* Andrew Hughes <ahughes at redhat.com> [2012-02-15 05:03]:
> Our support for IcedTea7 seems to be lacking, despite it becoming the primary release (and the only one on Fedora 17 on).
> During this release cycle, I've noticed several cases of patches being in IcedTea6 but not in IcedTea7, and developers
> on IRC have been hitting basic build issues, despite the release having occurred about four months ago.
> 
> I'd like to suggest that we switch to a similar policy to OpenJDK (Dalibor calls it the 'no fix left behind' policy) where
> fixes for IcedTea6 have to go into IcedTea7 first.  I think this will make it less likely that things will get missed and
> should concentrate people's minds on the new 7 series rather than 6.
>

I like this idea! I think we should go one step further -- nothing
should go into IcedTea7 until it has been proposed upstream and accepted
in HEAD at the very least, or rejected for a good reason (i.e.
something like: "here is a patch" .. "there is a problem in line 20, fix
and repost" ...  "nevermind, I don't want to do the re-work" is NOT a
good reason). There can be other logical exceptions too (e.g. patches
from those who do not wish to sign the OCA).

This will ensure minimal variance between what IcedTea ships and what
OpenJDK ships in the long run. Ideally I would like to see the
difference go to nil.. but I'm a dreamer :)

Cheers,
Deepak

> To begin with, the ARM port will have to be an exception but I'd also like to see this switch primarily to 7, once it
> works there.
> 
> Thoughts?
> -- 
> Andrew :)
> 
> Free Java Software Engineer
> Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)
> 
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