Moving Forward with IcedTea

[Andrew Hughes]

Dear all,

A new security update is due next month:

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

Prior to this, we should aim to release some of the recent bug fixes / feature additions
so they don't get lumped together with the security patches.  On that subject, I have a number
of proposals:

1.  Release updates of the 6 release branches.

A number of fixes are waiting on these branches, as yet unreleased:

1.10:

changeset:   2562:7b2da3e832e1
user:        Danesh Dadachanji <ddadacha at redhat.com>
date:        Fri Mar 09 13:48:15 2012 -0500
summary:     Backport for PR732: Use xsltproc for bootstrap xslt in place of Xerces/Xalan

changeset:   2563:182bdaba43ea
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Tue Apr 17 18:57:20 2012 +0200
summary:     PR881: Sign tests (wsse.policy.basic) failures with OpenJDK6

changeset:   2564:4515e31b48fa
tag:         tip
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Wed Apr 18 18:41:40 2012 +0200
summary:     Backport of: 6792400: Avoid loading of Normalizer resources for simple uses

1.11:

changeset:   2816:82c6fb23eed5
parent:      2809:a5c946d5f4bc
user:        aph
date:        Mon Feb 20 12:02:21 2012 +0000
summary:     Don't use shared Eden in incremental mode.

changeset:   2817:a5e1b251a3bb
parent:      2816:82c6fb23eed5
parent:      2815:a0dc54849da4
user:        aph
date:        Mon Feb 20 15:56:14 2012 +0000
summary:     merge

changeset:   2818:9543acd2586e
user:        aph
date:        Mon Feb 20 16:05:07 2012 +0000
summary:     Add PR# to ChangeLog.

changeset:   2819:a134afa67a3f
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Thu Mar 29 18:28:28 2012 +0200
summary:     Removed revert-6885123.patch to fix RH bug #789154 - javac error

changeset:   2820:16896bd9ecbc
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Tue Apr 17 19:00:05 2012 +0200
summary:     PR881: Sign tests (wsse.policy.basic) failures with OpenJDK6

changeset:   2821:d1bcc17048f3
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Wed Apr 18 18:47:34 2012 +0200
summary:     Backport of: 6792400: Avoid loading of Normalizer resources for simple uses

changeset:   2822:acc48a156236
tag:         tip
user:        ptisnovs
date:        Fri Apr 20 17:25:45 2012 +0200
summary:     NEWS: Mention bugfix PR797 (the same as bugfig RH789154).

PROPOSED RELEASE DATE: 9th of May, 2012.  13h00 UTC.

2.  IcedTea7 for u4.

Oracle have already released u4: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/7u4-relnotes-1575007.html

I propose to sync IcedTea7 to jdk7u4 b13 (the point u4 branched) and then create a 2.2 branch which can
then be prepared and tested for a 2.2 release.

PROPOSED BRANCH DATE: 2nd of May, 2012.  13h00 UTC (tomorrow).
PROPOSED RELEASE DATE: 16th of May, 2012.  13h00 UTC.

3. Retiring 1.9 & 2.0

I deliberately didn't list 1.9 under point 1.  To reduce the maintenance burden, I suggest we move to
support two release branches instead of three.  This would mean:

a.  No further releases of 1.9.x
b.  No further releases of 2.0.x once 2.2 occurs (see 2).

If someone wishes to maintain either or both of these, they are more than welcome to.

4. IcedTea8

Expect to see some IcedTea8 updates soon to get it back in sync with upstream development so it can
be a more useful base for work that goes upstream.  It would also be good to see distros starting to
package this, so it is tested much earlier than 7 was.

5. The ARM branch

Do we have a release date for an updated 2.1 release?  Or will it just end up going out with the
security update?  I don't think that's ideal.

Suggestions / criticisms / objections etc. welcome.
-- 
Andrew :)

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

PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
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