Hotspot shell games

[Kelly O'Hair]

(removed jdk7-dev from this discussion)

Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> 2009/5/29 Erik Trimble <Erik.Trimble at sun.com>:
[snip]
>> For now, though, we need to decide how to handle HSX vs Open6 vs. IceTea.
> 
> Simplest solution would be to just remove it from OpenJDK6 and use HSX
> as the upstream.  I don't see an advantage to pulling in to OpenJDK6,
> given there is already a 'stable' branch of HSX.

I would prefer to keep a hotspot repository in the openjdk6 forest, just
for the sake of having a buildable and complete source base.
I would also like to have some level of confidence as to which hotspot
is the default one for the openjdk6 project.
Let's not leave a partial jdk6 forest sitting out there.

To me the decision that needs to be made is whether you want the
openjdk6 hotspot repository (jdk6/hotspot) 'related' to the other
hotspot repositories, like hsx/hsx14/master is related to jdk7/hotspot.
It doesn't have to be, and there are advantages and disadvantages to
both approaches.
None of the non-hotspot repositories in the openjdk6 forest are related
to the jdk7 repositories, making them pretty independent from jdk7,
but hotspot is somewhat special, and the express model I support, so...

My suggestions...
   * Ignore hsx/hsx14, it's a drop not a development tree
   * Decide to make the jdk6 and jdk7 repositories 'related'
   * Tag the rev in the jdk7/hotspot repo with a name jdk6-b17, the
     rev that matches what is in the hsx14 repo
   * Toss the existing jdk6/hotspot repo and replace it with a repo
     created with:
         hg clone -r jdk6-b17 http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/hotspot jdk6/hotspot

Changes going into jdk6/hotspot should be rare, critical, and should
eventually be pushed back into jdk7/hotspot, indeed some critical fixes
may get transplanted from jdk7/hotspot to jdk6/hotspot.
If at some point it's decided to upgrade jdk6/hotspot to a newer rev,
so be it, easy to do.

And for heavens sake, start adding some hsx-* tags to the hotspot repository
so we can easily clone hsx versions from the tag name, you could also use
the hsx tag to hold the build number, I can help with that.

-kto