Follow-up: Branch github.com/openjdk/jdk for stabilization (instead of fork)

[Volker Simonis]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025 at 12:07 PM Magnus Ihse Bursie
<magnus.ihse.bursie at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> On 2025-06-13 16:32, Volker Simonis wrote:
>
> 2. The new stabilization branches have the same, unmodified README.md
> file like the main branch which is a little confusing. I propose that
> every time we create a new stabilization branch the first change in
> that new branch should update the README.md file (similar to what the
> community updates repositories are already doing [5]) with at least
> the following changes:
> - "Welcome to the JDK!" -> "Welcome to the JDK <NN>!"
> - Add a link to the corresponding release page (i.e.
> https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk/<NN>/)
>
> That sounds like a very good idea. In fact, I think we should add even more, like a text saying that this branch will be frozen after GA, that mainline development will happen on the master branch, and that further development on JDK NN will happen within the JDK Updates project.
>
> - The links to the build instructions should be changed to point to
> the build instructions in the corresponding branch otherwise they
> might eventually point to a newer, incompatible version
>
> What links are you referring to?

Sorry for the confusion. I just realized that the links to
`doc/building.{md,html}` are relative links and  therefor already
pointing to the correct files.

However, the link to the `online documentation` is pointing to
`https://openjdk.org/groups/build/doc/building.html` which isn't even
at GitHub but on openjkd.org and I don't know when and how that is
updated (in any case, it's currently just a single, static file for
all JDK versions). Instead, I propose to replace the link by something
like https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/jdk25/doc/building.html
which will serve the current file as HTML and make it always
up-to-date. Actually, once we have that, we could even remove the link
to `https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/jdk25/doc/building.html`
because looking at a raw HTML file is pretty inconvenient if you're
searching for build information.

>
> 3. The last one is more of a usability issue and I currently don't
> know how to solve it, but maybe someone else has an idea? Recently,
> GitHub changed the sorting order of branches in the pull-down menu for
> selecting a branch on their web page from alphabetical to "last
> recently used" [3]. This now makes it almost impossible to find the
> stabilization branches because they are buried somewhere in the middle
> of a ton of "pr/xxxx" branches.
>
> There is a search box in the drop down menu (at least for me, it might be some A/B testing change?). Typing "jdk" there filters out just the release branches. Not ideal, perhaps, but good enough. Let's hope GitHub adds some way to "favorite" branches to have them always show up first in the future.

I have that too, but you need to know what you're searching for (i.e.
"jdk...") in order to make it useful. But as I said, I don't have a
better solution either.

>
> /Magnus