...

[Andrew Haley]

On 28/06/2020 15:22, Gil Tene wrote:

> We simply don't have necessity behind the suggestion for adding a
> brand new garbage collector to the upstream 11u distribution. We
> have people who'd like to see it happen, and people who will agree
> to deal with he issues that may arise and help fix them in future
> updates. And we have multiple groups that are willing to run it
> internally within their large organizations and self-support if
> needed. But we don't have an external forcing event that says that
> unless we do this we'll be causing tons of end-users to break or
> start malfunctioning.

So Gil, please help me out here. You ship a (very) heavily modified
JDK11u in the shape of Zing to your customers, do you not? So you are
presumably not opposed to diverging heavily from 11u as a matter of
principle, and least not in your proprietary releases.

Perhaps the argument is that the addition of Shenandoah to JDK 11
might have been appropriate had it happened in the past, but it is not
appropriate now. Why does that make sense? Is it simply that there
has been more time for things in Zing to bake; but some downstream
distros have been shipping Shenandoah-ified versions of JDK11u for an
considerable time now, so it can't be that.

Or is it that it's OK for downstream distributors of JDK11u to modify
them heavily, but not JDK11u itself, (presumably) because it has more
users than any of them?

Or is it that all changes to JDK11u are in-principle bad, regardless
of their actual risk, which we should not consider? That possibility
seems a little odd. Given that most of your post is couched in terms
of risk, to say that we shouldn't strive to evaluate that risk would
be downright irrational.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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