Should I report this bug to Icedtea or directly to OpenJDK

[Andrew Dinn]

Hi Phil,

On 03/08/17 23:35, Philip Race wrote:
> The only text related difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK is the
> font rasteriser
> used (t2k vs freetype) and that is not at all the same thing as text
> layout.

Well, that's good to know!

> So are you are referring to the font rasteriser  ? One component of the
> whole wad-of-stuff.

I believe Andrew (Hughes) was referring to differences well in the past.
I certainly don't think he meant that GNU Classpath code used then to
replace your then binary only code is still in use now. I am sure Andrew
will clarify this.

> If icedtea used something else for text layout that is a different
> matter but those
> libraries are  what Oracle JDK + OpenJDK have always used for font
> rasterisation.
I wouldn't want to pre-empt whatever answer Andrew gives (he knows far
more than me in this area, particularly of the early history of icedtea)
but I will make a related comment. It's obviously very difficult for
non-Oracle OpenJDK devs to have a clear idea of what changes the Oracle
JDK includes modulo the open version of the source even though our
assumption is that they are fairly small. I have been asked quite a few
times about what these changes might be and differences in text handling
is the number one most common thing people have brought up as an
observable difference that they would like me to explain (usually it's
"why does X break/not break on OpenJDK when X doesn't break/breaks on
Oracle JDK", occasionally expressed with a tad more rhetorical force).
That may just be because text differences are easiest to spot of course.
Anyway, the point is that perhaps there is some only partially informed
folklore at play in our guesses as to what goes on in the closed source
code.

regards,


Andrew Dinn
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