Proposal: jcheck restrict addition of subrepo files

[Chris Hegarty]

Hi,

Recently I ran into an issue in a staging forest where a developer, when 
working on a partial forest, accidentally created a directory structure 
in a repository that conflicted with that of one of the sub/inner forest 
repositories.

For example, hypothetically, if a developer was working solely on the 
top level repo, they could accidentally add jdk/Test.java. This would 
cause problems when trying to clone the full forest, that contains the 
jdk repo.

Granted this doesn't occur that often, but when it does it consumes 
unnecessary cycles, and can be disruptive.

I've prototyped a very limited solution whereby a repo, through its 
jcheck conf, can define what inner|sub|containing repos are part of its 
forest. jcheck can then trivially prevent files being added that would 
conflict with this.

Trivial jcheck webrev (python level:novice) :

 
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~chegar/jcheck_subrepos_webrev.00/webrev/jcheck.py.udiff.html

Example update to .jcheck/conf in the jdk8 top level repo:

   diff -r 69b773a221b9 .jcheck/conf
   --- a/.jcheck/conf      Thu May 09 10:03:08 2013 -0700
   +++ b/.jcheck/conf      Tue May 14 11:25:33 2013 +0100
   @@ -1,1 +1,2 @@ project=jdk8
   project=jdk8
   +subrepos=corba,jaxp,jaxws,langtools,jdk,hotspot,nashorn

Note: Since jcheck current ignores name/value pairs in the conf that are 
not needed, no special co-ordination would be required between updating 
the jcheck/conf in individual forests and the release of an updated 
jcheck version. The enforcement will only happen over time, when both of 
the above have occurred.

Thanks,
-Chris.