CFV: New JDK Updates Committer: Jie Kang

[Mario Torre]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 2:33 PM David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Mario,

Hi David,

> Please clarify which of these are actual contributions by Jie and which
> are simply "hg import" of the original changeset. I do not consider a
> clean import as a contribution. If there is more to this that warrants
> being considered a contribution then please elaborate.

Here's more information about each backport:

Those required re-work:
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8205516
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8213448
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8232806

Those were "clean" backports (for some definition of clean):
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8214896
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8214925
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8218935
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8225694
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8223697
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8215771
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8233075
https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8219904

However I have a real problem marking clean backports as a "simple hg
import of the original changeset", because it's never the case. Each
patch needs to be studied and understood and tested, even when it
applied cleanly, so there's real work involved, and you can see this
for example in the discussion about JDK-8223697, which despite
applying cleanly was actually a result of a few back and forth and
required assessment of another patch that didn't apply cleanly. I
would be very worried if any developer would apply a patch, see that
it's clean and just pushes it.

There's maybe an issue in the process where the updates project is
also responsible to produce the topmost stable release (i.e. JDK15u)
and so the Committer role is akin to that of Committer for the jdk-dev
in this case, but for the most part the updates produce maintenance
releases of typically older trains, like JDK 11 or 13 (8u is not in
this by chance, because back then we had a separate update project for
each version).

Selecting a Committer for those versions would be very difficult if we
only allowed non clean backports as contributions, because the reality
is that most of the backports apply cleanly or with trivial
modifications, so the rationale behind a Yes vote, in my opinion,
should be the quality of the work this developer does (which means
also ensuring that a patch that is a clean backport is also
contextually accurate and does not have unwanted side effects), the
frequency of his contributions and the likelihood that he will
continue contributing. Of course, YMMV, and I respect that.

> Further there is a hole in our role checking if a non-committer actually
> pushed backport changesets in the first place!

Jie didn't push those patches, he contributed them and someone
(usually Christopher!) pushed them.

Cheers,
Mario

-- 
Mario Torre
Associate Manager, Software Engineering
Red Hat GmbH <https://www.redhat.com>
9704 A60C B4BE A8B8 0F30  9205 5D7E 4952 3F65 7898