IMPORTANT: Hotpot changes going to 8u releases

[Alejandro E Murillo]

Next week jdk8u releases will become mostly sustaining releases,
so  at that point all  8u group development repos will be
consolidated into just one repo: jdk8u/jdk8u-dev.

Implications/guidelines for hotspot developers:

(1) jdk8u/hs-dev, and other similar group repos,  will become read only.

(2) Hotspot developers should push any hotspot change intended
for any upcoming 8u release, at any stage of the release, to 
jdk8u/jdk8u-dev.

(3) Since hotspot changes are not being integrated in a bulk anymore,
  developers need to request approval to push, on 
jdk8u-dev at openjdk.java.net,
for each change they plan to push into jdk8u/jdk8u-dev as non hotspot 
developers
currently do. That's in addition to the required request for review
(which is usually done on hotspot-dev at openjdk.java.net)

(4) As usual, if a release has entered in RDP2, the necessary approvals
need to be requested,  but the push will still be made to jdk8u/jdk8u-dev.
Repo maintainers will bring them up to the stabilization repos.

(5) Since most of the teams  will be pushing manually, hotspot 
developers will
not be required to make the push via JPRT, but it is required to run a
full JPRT job with "-testset hotspot" before doing the manual push as a
sanity check (that should be done in addition to the regular tests 
developers
are required to do for the specific change to be pushed).
Of course, the baseline might change between the time a snapshot is taken
(to submit the JPRT job), and the point when the actual push is done,
but at least that will set a checkpoint and minimize the risk.

(6) The jdk8u-dev repo maintainers are asking developers to give them,
and other developers, a heads up, perhaps via jdk8u-dev at openjdk.java.net,
when  you plan to push high impact changes.

Thanks

-- 
Alejandro