Adapting IcedTea for the new OpenJDK build system (build-infra)

[Omair Majid]

Hi,

I can't speak for the entire community, but I will share my experience
and what I have seen.

* Magnus Ihse Bursie <magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com> [2014-01-22 15:57]:
> Now, 1.5 years later and with the release of JDK8 getting closer,
> I'm just curious on how the IcedTea project is doing with JDK8. I've
> been skimming this list and I haven't seen any references to JDK8,
> but I'm not sure what that means.

Mostly, it just means that most of us have been too busy with other
things (including OpenJDK/IcedTea 6 and 7) to work much on IcedTea 8. We
are tracking what needs to be added to OpenJDK8 for IcedTea8 here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea_Patches_for_OpenJDK_8

But that's just patches and not most of the other work that has been put
into IcedTea6 or IcedTea7.

> Have you started any IcedTea support for JDK8,

I am not sure; we haven't updated IcedTea8 in a while (at least, not
that I know of).

> or did it actually
> end up with IcedTea not being needed for JDK8?

Speaking for myself, I have actually added a non-IcedTea8 build of
OpenJDK8 to Fedora [1]. It is missing lots of things that are maintained
in IcedTea, though. Still, as a proof of concept, it seems like it is
mostly working.

I think we will need _some_ variant of IcedTea8 for OpenJDK8. Even
ignoring all the non-OpenJDK parts of IcedTea (such as alternate VMs and
ports), we will need it for release branches. We need release branches
(and releases/tags). In lots of distributions, major version updates are
not allowed and we need to have release branches that just contain
security fixes (and major bug fixes) but nothing else.

> Is the new build system of any help?

IMO, the answer is a big "YES". The new build system (thanks to it's
autotools nature) is both familiar and sensible when it comes to
adding/removing and modifying things. I have found most fixes rather
straight-forward. If I have been a little slow in trying to upstream
them, it's because I was hesitant to re-implement the build fixes in
both the old build system and the new build system.

Thanks,
Omair

[1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/java-1.8.0-openjdk.git/tree/java-1.8.0-openjdk.spec#n427

-- 
PGP Key: 66484681 (http://pgp.mit.edu/)
Fingerprint = F072 555B 0A17 3957 4E95  0056 F286 F14F 6648 4681