OpenJDK 6 and 6u10 features

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Joe,

On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 15:48 -0700, Joseph D. Darcy wrote:
> OpenJDK 6 build 12 contained ports of bug fixes from a number of 6u10 
> component areas (corba, jaxp, jaxws, langtools). [1]

Are these component areas now completely in sync?

> Most changes from 
> the core jdk component area of 6u10 were not ported.  The porting effort 
> that took place of a relatively small number of bugs to a subset of the 
> full OpenJDK code base was still a sizeable effort. [2]  The full set of 
> changes made to the core jdk in 6u10 is many times larger with a 
> proportionally larger porting cost.

Is there a list of these changes/bugs that are in 6u10, but not in
openjdk6 yet?

What about hotspot? I saw they will start using Mercurial directly. That
should help with syncing that workspace also.

>   We at Sun do not plan to do a 
> wholesale port of those 6u10 features from the core jdk to OpenJDK 6.  
> However, over the coming months we will be porting those 6u10 features 
> to OpenJDK 7 and we would welcome community assistance in backporting 
> appropriate features from OpenJDK 7 to OpenJDK 6.

I think people will be happy to (at least it sounds fun to me). If you
provide a list of changesets that went into 7 and are candidates for 6
we can setup a schedule for backporting.

> (These jdk area 
> features in 6u10 are separate from plugin and webstart functionality.)

What is the future of the plugin/webstart functionality? In IcedTea we
do have free replacements.

Ideally in the end we should see the people doing the closedjdk6 update
releases base their updates on openjdk6 workspaces instead of using a
fork. That would consolidate more work on a shared repository. What
steps would be necessary for the various workspaces to be shared
commonly between closed/openjdk6?

If that is too much work, or unfeasible because there are still too many
proprietary blobs in closedjdk6, would it be an idea to have a jdk7
spurt to get to a common shared code base sooner? Is there a timeline
for 7 yet?

Cheers,

Mark