Clarification regarding the GitHub Actions pre-submit testing

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2021/3/18 11:31:25 -0700, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com>:
> On 3/18/21 6:14 PM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
>> On 3/18/21 5:51 PM, Andrew Haley wrote:
>>> ...
>>> 
>>> If we are to allow many ports into OpenJDK, and I believe we should,
>>> then the burden of even stubbing things out to make sure that all
>>> weird ports work is intolerable for contributors. It can not scale.
>> 
>> ...that feeds into question which ports do we accept to GHA.
>> 
>> "Weird ports" [1] should not be the part of it. Current list
>> includes all actively maintained mainline ports: x86_64,
>> x86_32, aarch64, arm32, ppc64le, s390x, zero. For which not
>> only we have active maintainers, but we also have build
>> instructions in OpenJDK docs, not to mention the GHA workflow
>> script itself.
> 
> For avoidance of doubt, I'm very much in favour of GHA testing and
> think there should be more of it, and weird ports may be included.
> Information is good.
> 
> Here's how I think it could work. If there is an obvious/trivial
> fix revealed by GHA testing, the committer should fix it,
> Otherwise, it should be fixed by the port maintainer. In the
> latter case, the committer should try to contact the port
> maintainer to explain the situation. The committer isn't required
> to wait for longer than X days.

Two questions:

  (1) If weird ports are included in GHA testing then doesn’t that leave
      contributors with the intolerable burden of stubbing things out in
      a way that does not scale, as you wrote earlier (see above)?

  (2) If the fix is non-trivial and the committer is obliged to contact
      the port maintainer to explain the situation, what is it that you
      expect to happen before X days pass?  Is the committer supposed to
      wait for at most X days for the port maintainer to provide a fix?

> That's a best effort way we can all work together, doesn't impose
> undue burdens on either committers or port maintainers, and we
> should all be happy to do as good citizens.

A laudable goal, I agree.

I’d like to hear from other contributors on this -- especially those who
work on code that often requires architecture- or OS-specific porting
(e.g., HotSpot, core libraries).

- Mark