Timeline for 11.0.4 development

[Langer, Christoph]

Hi Andrew,

> I'm happy for you to decide the day as you're doing the work.
> 
> As to the date of the freeze, I suggested the 1st because it was a known
> date on every cycle. Doing it earlier works in my favour, so I'm not
> going to argue against that too strongly! I'm just aware that people
> were still pushing changes on the 1st this time around.

As for this one: The maintainers that approve patches have some control over this. E.g. if the freeze comes close, the maintainer should not hesitate to defer critical fixes or, in case of approval let the requester know that the fix must pe pushed quickly.

> Obviously, the problem of using the last tagging date of the month
> before (March, June, September and December) has its own problems, as it
> varies how much time people have to commit. It could mean the last date
> is as early as a week before (not sure if you intend to have the last
> tag on Wednesday the 1st if it falls that way, or the Wednesday before).

Oracle delivers the patches always on a Tuesday. So we should plan for the last tag in the public repo 3 weeks before that.

> However, this doesn't seem too problematic if it is announced clearly
> well in advance, as you have here.  Also, putting it on the wiki is a
> good idea, as things get lost in all this e-mail.

Yes, I think we should announce the freeze for the "tagging Wednesday" that we aim for and I'll definitely add/update the days in the Wiki, once we have them confirmed.

> In short, I'm happy to go with this schedule and freeze after you tag on
> the 26th.

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> Do you plan a similar schedule for 8u?

I think when we have the schedule confirmed for jdk11u, we can simply take it over to jdk8u. I can do the announcement mail and update both Wikis (jdk8u and jdk11u).

As for jdk8u in general: Since the SAP team does not build a downstream SapMachine 8 binary, we are looking at OpenJDK8u with quite low focus. E.g. we don't have the extensive testing environment at hand as we do for JDK11. So beginning with the next update release, I would step back from doing the tagging/integration work in jdk8u.

Best regards
Christoph