Supporting IcedTea7

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> * 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 :)

I don't think that's practical at the moment.  Apart from the OCA issue,
it means all IcedTea folks would have to have commit access to OpenJDK.  Given the
recent changes, I'm not even sure I have that any more (!) and there's been
debate over your recent OpenJDK patches as you know.  I'm going to test
things out over the next week or so now the releases are out.

We can't make it a requirement of all IcedTea contributors if we're not even
sure those of us who are regular OpenJDK contributors can achieve it.

As I said to Omair's suggestion, small steps... let's start by at least keeping
IcedTea6 & 7 in sync and go from there.  It's a nice ideal but I don't want
to allow Oracle bureaucracy to let IcedTea grind to a halt.  When OpenJDK
is on par with IcedTea in terms of commit access and bug reporting, it may
become feasible.

Of course, this doesn't even work for fixes to things that aren't upstream;
JamVM & CACAO fixes, build fixes, the ARM port, PulseAudio, etc.

> 
> 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)
> > 
> > PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
> > Fingerprint = EC5A 1F5E C0AD 1D15 8F1F  8F91 3B96 A578 248B DC07
> > 
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

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

PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EC5A 1F5E C0AD 1D15 8F1F  8F91 3B96 A578 248B DC07