Enhancements

[Chen Liang]

Hello Tom,
Yes, the JDK project and the OpenJDK organization do accept enhancements.  However, they are usually less likely to be accepted compared to bug fixes, due to that they often need long-term maintenance and may become a "peak of complexity solution" (like finalization and security manager) in the future.  The addition of an enhancement is much easier than the removal of one, especially for core libraries.

In the core libraries, enhancements are mainly feasible due to their motivation, even though we would love to see these test coverage and nice implementation and specification.  A positive example is the recent addition of Reader::of(CharSequence) https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8341566 which is nicely motivated because a Reader is "for reading character streams" and there are immediate (no synchronization as in StringReader) and future (potential to immediately support future batch-copy methods on CharSequence) benefits to such an API.

Since the advantage and the long term implications of enhancements (especially new library APIs, as we won't be able to remove them easily) are not always clear, we strongly recommend sending to mailing lists before creating an issue on the JBS or bugs.java.com.  Meanwhile, we usually wish to settle down the API signature before moving on to review the implementation, so there's a suggestion for people to send the APIs implemented with throw UOE, so people can first focus on the basis (the API signatures) before moving on the implementation details to avoid waste of review efforts.

Regards.
Chen Liang
________________________________
From: jdk-dev <jdk-dev-retn at openjdk.org> on behalf of Tom Mooney <Tom.Mooney at bjss.com>
Sent: Friday, November 1, 2024 9:08 AM
To: jdk-dev at openjdk.org <jdk-dev at openjdk.org>
Subject: Enhancements

Hi

Does OpenJDK accept enhancements from contributors at all? It was suggested previously to prefer fixing bugs over enhancements but if the enhancements aren't too risky and on the smaller side of medium in size and not too risky are they likely to be accepted if you provide excellent test coverage, clean implementation and clear complete documentation that you'd done everything you need too. Is it good to define a general Definition of Done for this project so we can just work through a set of tasks to complete a ticket to maximise the chances our contributions will be accepted?

Ta
Tom


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