OpenJDK 6 and 6u10 features

[Joseph D. Darcy]

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 2008/10/31 Joseph D. Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com>:
>   
>> Greetings.
>>
>> OpenJDK 6 build 12 contained ports of bug fixes from a number of 6u10
>> component areas (corba, jaxp, jaxws, langtools). [1]  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 portingh cost.  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'm not too surprised by this.  OpenJDK7 is clearly the development
> focus for Sun and has seen development at a level several orders of
> magnitude higher than that of OpenJDK6.  However, for the time being,
> this is pointless for pretty much anyone else, as we're unlikely to be
> using OpenJDK7 for at least another year (there is as yet no platform
> specification and thus no feature set for the release).
>
> I read your blog and I don't see what not porting the changes to
> OpenJDK6 would achieve.  All the work mentioned there is going to
> apply just as much to OpenJDK7, and essentially all the 7 to 6 port
> would be is applying the changesets to the OpenJDK6 tree.  Of course,
>   

Yes, there is a large effort to port the code from 6u10 to OpenJDK 7.  
However, given the existence of a port to 7, it should be comparatively 
little effort, perhaps none, to adopt that port to OpenJDK 6.  I 
wouldn't expect the effort required to be zero in all cases; there have 
been additional changes that have gone into JDK 7 since OpenJDK 6 
branched off that could cause conflicts, etc.

> if the changesets are clearly marked as they go into OpenJDK7, we can
> easily apply such patches to IcedTea6, where they can then later be
> consumed by OpenJDK6.  
>   

Once the OpenJDK 6 Mercurial repositories are online, I'd like to see 
the porting work go directly there :-)

> The markup part is essential, because patches
> going into the dozens of JDK7 mercurial trees is going to be extremely
> difficult to track from our side.
>   

Yes, I'll talk to the client team and see what we can work out for 
notification.
> But the effort needed would seem to be in trawling the bug database
> and converting from the Teamware sources, which the community
> obviously can't do because neither system is fully accessible outside
> Sun.  Once they are in OpenJDK7, the work is virtually done AFAICS.
>
> I think the real issue to address is why development work on 6 is
> still being performed on closed Teamware repositories and resulting in
> these kind of issues in the first place.  We may be able to work round
> things this time, but unless the actual process that created this mess
> changes, we'll have to go through all of this again for u11 and
> however many others follow.  Really, the priority should be getting
> the OpenJDK6 Mercurial repositories setup and developing updates to 6
> there, where they can be trivially merged to 7.
>
>   (These jdk area features in 6u10 are separate from
>   
>> plugin and webstart functionality.)
>>
>>     
>
> Are there any plans for these to appear yet?
>
>   
>> Kelly has made substantial progress in preparing the OpenJDK 6 Mercurial
>> repositories and at least trial versions of them should be available within
>> a few weeks.
>>
>>     
>
> Does this still include updating HotSpot to b11?
>   

The work Kelly has done to date has not included the HotSpot 
repositories; he and I are having discussions with the HotSpot team 
about this.

-Joe