JDK 11.0.3 Update process

[Andrew Haley]

On 2/15/19 6:06 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:

> As I said before [0], I think the jdkxxu repository should be
> restricted, maintaining a clear distinction between a jdkxxu-dev
> branch for developers to commit to, and the jdkxxu for
> consumption. The latter is the one that would be frozen and used as
> the base for releases around CPU time.  That avoids a situation
> where people push stuff to jdkxxu in the interim and then are
> surprised when it's not in the release.
> 
> If there's an issue with a lack of a maintainer, then that's a sign
> we need to appoint more, not abandon the whole idea.

I have thought some more about this, and I now believe there is a
deeper issue.

The problem is that we've been conflating two roles in the
"maintainer". One is someone whose role is essentially judgemental:
they decide whether a patch is suitable for a particular release. The
other role is integrative: they merge a patch into a release branch
and make sure the result works by testing it. These two roles are not
the same thing, and require different skills.

We are likely to encounter scaling problems as we work on the updates
projects and we will do ourselves no favours by creating bottlenecks
to efficient parallel working. A mature updates project would allow
many people, with different skills, to work together on a release
branch. Not all of these people would have the authority (or even the
desire) to approve patches.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
EAC8 43EB D3EF DB98 CC77 2FAD A5CD 6035 332F A671