Clarification regarding the GitHub Actions pre-submit testing

[Alan Bateman]

On 17/03/2021 13:43, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
> :
>
> Technically speaking, in the last few months we saw issues that 
> slipped through Oracle's build-test system. Arch-specific build 
> breakages were caught by GHA. Not sure if Oracle systems run any 
> 32-bit tests, so 32-bit build/test failures were caught. There were 
> issues when a minor post-internal-testing fix actually broke the code, 
> and it was caught by GHA, which runs on every sync.

The topic of ports and maintainers has come up a few times at the 
OpenJDK Committers Workshop. At least some of us had hoped it would lead 
to some agreement on the ports that are required to build at all times, 
and/or a maintainers file that name the people responsible for keeping 
specific ports and features alive.

For the most part it has defined itself. If a change causes breakage on 
linux-x64, windows-x64, macosx-x64 or linux-aarch64 then it is 
disruptive to a lot of people and needs urgent attention, at least when 
it breaks with versions of a toolchain that are widely used. On the 
other hand, breakage to ports such as linux-s390 or aix-ppc64 doesn't 
impact too many people and can be fixed up later (the SAP engineers seem 
to work tirelessly to keep these ports going).

I'm not aware of any recent discussion/agreement on the 32-bit ports. 
Oracle engineers haven't been building the main line on 32-bit for 
several years (I think JDK 8 was the last) so periodic/temporary 
breakage isn't too surprising. I don't know when 32-bit was added to the 
GitHub Actions but requiring all changes to be build/tested on 32-bit 
would need discussion. I'm thinking specifically of some of the bigger 
OpenJDK projects that will involving non-trivial porting  and whether 
they will now be required to have 32-bit ports completed before integrating.

-Alan.