Draft of restarted "OpenJDK Developers' Guide" available for discussion

[joe.darcy at oracle.com]

Greetings.

I've been working on a restarted version of the "OpenJDK Developers' 
Guide" and I have a draft far enough along for general discussion.  The 
content of the existing guide [1] is primarily logistical and procedural 
in nature; in time, I plan to migrate this information to a JDK 7 
specific page because many of the details are release-specific.  The new 
guide is more conceptual and once completed is intended to be able to 
last for several releases without major updating.

The table of contents of draft version 0.775 is

    * Preface
    * OpenJDK Development Motto
    * Kinds of Releases
          o General Evolution Policy
    * Kinds of Compatibility
          o Source Compatibility
          o Binary Compatibility
          o Behavioral Compatibility
          o API Compatibility Case Study
          o Other Kinds of Compatibility
          o Managing Compatibility
    * Kinds of Interfaces
          o What is an interface?
          o Specification = Syntax + Semantics
          o Official and Unofficial Interfaces
          o Importing and Exporting Interfaces
    * Developing a Change
          o Coding Guidelines
          o Source Code Management
          o Code Reviews
          o Regression and Unit Tests
          o Deprecation
    * TODO

The full draft is available from:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~darcy/OpenJdkDevGuide/

The compatibility sections are currently more fully developed than the 
ones about developing a change.

All level of feedback is welcome, from correcting typos, to stylistic 
suggestions, to proposals for new sections.

Initially, I plan to maintain the guide as an HTML file and publish new 
versions as needed.  Over time, guide maintenance may transition to more 
formal version control, such as a small Mercurial repository or a wiki.

Thanks,

-Joe Darcy

[1] http://openjdk.java.net/guide/