OpenJDK 6 and 6u10 features

[Martin Buchholz]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 04:21, Andrew John Hughes
<gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org> wrote:

> Yes, I can see the point of porting to 7 instead of 6 because there
> seems to be far more development effort being deployed by Sun on this
> codebase.  From the perspective of shipping a Free JDK now, this
> doesn't make sense but it does from the perspective of developing new
> code.  However, outside participation is still limited on this because
> there is no clearly defined open specification for what will be part
> of JDK 7 yet, and so no clear way for external participation in
> OpenJDK7 more than simple bug fixing.  Such bug fixes are more likely
> to occur on OpenJDK6 because this is what people will tend to run,
> given its stability.

The historical reality is that *small* spec changes were handled in much
the same way as bug fixes - a Sun sponsor shepherded the changes
through the Sun-internal approval process.  At the end of a release,
all the small changes were incorporated into the umbrella JSR for the release,
and approved en masse.  So you didn't need a final JDK spec to do work;
ratification by the JCP has typically been an after-the-fact formality.

Today you can do the same.  The hard part is finding the Sun sponsor
to do the (non-trivial) shepherding work.

Martin