OpenJDK 6 and 6u10 features

[Andrew John Hughes]

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 porting 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,
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.  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.

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?

> -Joe
>
> [1]
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk6-dev/2008-September/000150.html
> [2] http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/openjdk_6_logistics_of_partial
>
>

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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