[11u] Some information

[Langer, Christoph]

Hi,

hereby I’d like to share some (hopefully useful and interesting) information for folks engaged with JDK 11 updates:

1. Updated “How-to-Contribute” Wiki: The well-known Wiki describing the process for backporting fixes [0] has undergone some overhaul with regards to the new GitHub/Skara process. I hope it’s correct, understandable and helpful to those who seek out for some guidance on how to get fixes in. Feedback and fixes to the doc are highly appreciated. And thanks to those who contributed to updating it.

2. GitHub Actions: The GitHub Actions workflow has been backported to JDK11u already a little while ago. For those who haven’t noticed and/or not activated it yet on their personal fork repos, please do so now. If you use the “/backport” GitHub comment commands, you will want to enable GHA on the bot repo [1]. Having GHA in place will help to build confidence in the backports and make sure that we don’t integrate things like simple build errors on the covered platforms.

3. Dependent Pull Requests: Also a while ago we enabled a Skara feature, called “Dependent Pull Requests” on jdk11u-dev. Some people might know it from head already. This can be useful if you are backporting a chain of changes, e.g. some main change followed by further build and test fixes which should be committed as separate entities. Then you can base follow up fixes on their logical predecessors by opening PRs against branches that pop up for predecessor PRs, named “pr/<ID>”. When the predecessor is merged, the dependent is automatically retargeted against master. Unfortunately the feature is not documented on the Skara pages so far but you’ll find some information in a former mail thread on skara-dev [3]. Please feel encouraged to try it out and report your findings to the Skara folks. ��

Best regards
Christoph

[0] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/JDKUpdates/How+to+contribute+a+fix
[1] https://github.com/openjdk-bots/jdk11u-dev/actions
[2] https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/skara-dev/2021-March/004528.html