Upcoming Releases of 1.12.0 & 2.4.0

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> Could you update the table in
> http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ReleasePolicy
> with details about IcedTea 2.4?
> 

I will as soon as it's released :-)

Things went rather awry with Oracle releasing the security
update two weeks early.  I wanted to get 2.4.0 before we got
to that update.  I suspect it will now happen the week after
I get back from vacation (5th of March).

> 
> Also, could you clarify the new maintainership of IcedTea6 1.12,
> perhaps by s/1.11/1.x/ and perhaps s/IcedTea/IcedTea 2.x/ ?
> 

I'm not sure I follow.  The following releases are currently supported:

1.11.x
1.12.x
2.1.x
2.2.x
2.3.x

This will change to the following when 2.4.0 is finally released:

1.11.x
1.12.x
2.1.x
2.3.x
2.4.x

The support of 2.1.x is an anomaly. It should have become obsolete when
2.3.x was released, but Zero & the ARM32 port still don't work on anything
newer.  I wouldn't recommend it for x86/x86_64/SPARC or anyone using alternative
VMs (CACAO/JamVM).  I guess you could say it's semi-supported in the Zero/ARM32
case only.  The standard is to support the last two release streams.

The use of "IcedTea6" over "IcedTea" is something of a holdover because of a name-clash
(i.e. there are also releases based on OpenJDK 7 going up to 1.14 that happened prior to
the GA of OpenJDK 7: http://blog.fuseyism.com/index.php/2011/05/25/icedtea7-114-released/).
Maybe it's about time we finally dropped it, as the likelihood of someone using these
old OpenJDK 7 releases seems very low (and is definitely unsupported).

At the major release level,

1 = OpenJDK 6
2 = OpenJDK 7
3 = OpenJDK 8

I know that can be initially a little obscure, as there was no IcedTea (nor OpenJDK)
for Java 1.0 through 1.5.  Maybe we should instead call them:

6.11.x
6.12.x
7.1.x
7.3.x
7.4.x

Thoughts?

> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Andrew Hughes <
> gnu.andrew at redhat.com > wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to do a couple of new releases of both 6 & 7 by the end of
> this week (Friday the 25th of January, 2013). This will enable us
> to get some fixes out to users that are lurking only in HEAD.
> This is particularly true of 6 where the last major release is nearly
> a year ago (30th of January, 2012). Note that 2.4.0 is already tagged
> in the forest, so any remaining changes prior to release will only
> take place in IcedTea7.
> 
> These release will also make the upcoming security release [1]
> easier,
> as we will then update them rather than the aging 1.10 and 2.2,
> as stated in [2]. In particular, is becoming painful to maintain
> as it has two HotSpot releases. Others are, of course, welcome to
> update
> these releases if they so wish.
> 
> I intend to delay creating branches for these releases until after
> the
> release, as neither repository is particularly high traffic at the
> moment. Please bear this in mind if you intend to commit work this
> week, and perhaps consider delaying it until the week after if it
> will
> be fairly disruptive.
> 
> If anyone has objections to the release of 1.12 and 2.4 this Friday,
> please reply to this mail as soon as possible. I'm unwilling to delay
> them much further as we get closer to the update, and I'd rather not
> be bundling feature updates with security updates.
> 
> The security update will still bring updates for 1.11, 2.1 and 2.3
> (2.1 being for the ARM32 port), so an option remains between the new
> releases and the old.
> 
> [1]
> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html
> [2] http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ReleasePolicy
> 
> Thanks,
> --
> 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/)
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