JDK Updates Project Page

[Mario Torre]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 7:47 PM, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:

> My worry with moving away from the mailing list approach is it
> decreases the transparency
> even more. Now only those monitoring the bug will see what's going on.
> It's also worth noting
> that not everyone who posts to the update mailing lists has access to
> the OpenJDK bug database.
> I've filed bugs and pushed fixes on behalf of others before.

I actually suggested that to have an all in one place discussion, but
Rob mentioned what you say too, that only people with bug database
access would be able to participate in the discussion, which is
obviously a no-go, the discussion needs to stay open, hence on the
mailing list.

I think the rules as they stand are pretty ok, for LTS we will need
different rules but limiting critical bugs to the short term updates
makes sense. We only need to ensure that we can rise bugs to P1 for
platforms that are not Oracle main interest, like AArch64 or PPC as
you mention or for issues that are not marked as critical by Oracle
but are for a given 3rd party. With the short term release, though,
keeping a number of patches in downstream builds may be practical to
sustain - considering that we are talking about back ports, those
fixes will be in upstream repositories already.

I wonder if it isn't best to have this conversation again after the 9
and perhaps 10 versions will be EOL to see what is getting accumulated
in downstream builds and see if we need a process change to limit the
differences. Other than that, I don't see much of a problem, releases
are only 6 months away each other, if for some reason 9 is EOLed by
Oracle but, just as an example, Red Hat or SAP wants to keep
maintaining it, this is the same process as we already do now for 6, 7
and eventually 8, at the take over patches can be merged into the main
repository and back ported as newer versions go on for as long as this
is needed.

Again, the weak link where I expect that to actually happen is the
LTS, but this will need a separate set of rules, as we all seem to
agree anyway.

All that said, you are clearly the most authoritative person regarding
back ports issues, if you think something should be changed to
facilitate the work with short term releases I think your feedback is
really important to have.

Cheers,
Mario