JDK11/8 Updates: process, schedules and tagging

[Langer, Christoph]

Hi,

after we had the discussion about the OpenJDK 8/11 release process and schedule [0], I’d like to explicitly spell out the current status and update the Wiki pages.

It seems like we have agreed to a 3 phase model


1. Development
2. Rampdown (RDP2)
3. Freeze

I’ve updated the timelines on the Wiki pages [1], [2] now accordingly. Please check/review.

I would short-summarize our process like this:
During development phase, changes go into the development repositories (jdk8u-dev/jdk11u-dev) and weekly tagging will be done in there. When the release repositories (jdk8u/jdk11u) aren’t blocked by rampdown/freeze of the previous release, the tags will be synced on a weekly basis to the release repositories. When rampdown of a release starts, merges from dev to release repositories are suspended and RDP2 approved changes have to be pushed to the release repositories. From that time merges happen from release->dev. After the freeze tag, no changes must go into the release repository while the CPU is assembled non publicly. After release, the CPU is merged back to the open repositories.

Is that our common understanding? If I get no objections, I’ll update the process description pages [3] and [4] accordingly.

I furthermore have 2 questions / things to clarify.

a) Will we tag in the dev-repositories right from the start? E.g. will we start tagging 11.0.5 right after the 11.0.4 RDP2 integration from 11u-dev to 11u in the week after May 28?
    - I would suggest to do so.
b) Will we also do a weekly tag when no changes happened after the previous tag? This should probably be a rare case given the current activities but we should have a guideline for that.
    - My feeling would be to skip the tag then. I can’t see any value in this.

May I please have your feedback on that (especially from the Andrews ��)

Thanks
Christoph

[0] https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2019-April/000996.html
[1] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/JDKUpdates/JDK11u
[2] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/jdk8u/Main
[3] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/JDKUpdates/Detailed+Process+Description
[4] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/jdk8u/Detailed+Process+Description