JDK 11.0.3 Update process
Andrew Hughes
gnu.andrew at redhat.com
Mon Feb 18 22:49:56 UTC 2019
n Mon, 18 Feb 2019 at 09:42, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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
Indeed. In the Oracle sense, it is very much the former role of
adjudicating on which changes make it to the release and which don't.
The other role has been largely nameless, because that process is
basically opaque under Oracle ownership; once they branch the tree
(privately) for "RDP2", the only evidence we have of activity is entries
in the bug database.
So this is the area we really need to define more in-depth. At the end of
day, primary responsibility will have to go to someone who can do TCK
testing as any release should pass that. On what platforms that is the
case is yet another issue, so the work may need to be distributed against
multiple interested parties.
OpenJDK 6 & 7 have been much lower traffic, so we have generally got away
with doing our Red Hat builds and TCK testing, and then just doing the final
push & release in public. The process will need to be formalised for 8u & 11u.
--
Andrew :)
Senior Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)
Web Site: http://fuseyism.com
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