The future of OpenJDK6

[Andrew Haley]

On 03/14/2013 02:44 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> On 03/13/2013 07:47 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> Oracle ended public updates of JDK6 at the end of last month.
>>>>  Many
>>>> people seem to have concluded that the OpenJDK6 project will
>>>> therefore
>>>> end at the same time.  This is incorrect: OpenJDK6 will continue,
>>>> but
>>>> will be maintained by the community outside Oracle.
>>>
>>> 1.  Oracle had three main roles in relation to OpenJDK 6; acting as
>>> gatekeeper over which patches were accepted into the repository,
>>> providing security updates and making releases.  The third of these
>>> doesn't seem to be addressed above.  Will new releases of OpenJDK 6
>>> be made?  IcedTea for OpenJDK 6 uses release tarballs as a base so,
>>> unless there are further releases, none of the changes made
>>> upstream
>>> in OpenJDK 6 will be consumed by IcedTea downstream.  I believe we
>>> are already overdue a new release as there is no release of OpenJDK
>>> 6 containing the last three sets of security updates.
>>
>> Indeed, we need to make a new release of OpenJDK 6 with the security
>> patches.  There may be infrastructure issues here as we don't AFAIK
>> have access to Oracle servers on which to place release tarballs.  Or
>> do we?
> 
> Not as far as I know, but I don't see how it matters where they are located,
> as long as people are notified of the location.
> 
> I'm more concerned that they happen promptly and tarballs are produced with
> the same form and contents. Hopefully, there is some obscure Makefile target
> that creates them but I'm not aware of it offhand.

OK.

>>> 2.  What many people actually see as OpenJDK 6 at present, in the
>>> form of their GNU/Linux distribution package, is actually IcedTea
>>> for OpenJDK 6.  Unlike 7, where the changes in IcedTea are just to
>>> make it "distro-ready" (using system libraries, etc.), there are
>>> now so many backports and other fixes local to IcedTea 6 that it
>>> is effectively a different beast altogether.  Will OpenJDK 6 be
>>> open to accepting some of these fixes, many of which were added to
>>> the proprietary version of JDK 6 maintained by Oracle a long time
>>> ago, so the two can eventually be in sync?
>>
>> That would, in my view, be a huge waste of effort.  It also risks
>> breaking things for no net gain.
> 
> The gain would be to shift the focus from IcedTea6 to OpenJDK6.
> Pretty much no-one uses OpenJDK6 directly, as far as I'm aware.  All
> the distro packages I've seen use IcedTea6 to build it with these
> patches applied.  When I last tried OpenJDK6, I had to push four
> changesets upstream just to get it to build on a modern system.
> 
> If things were broken with these patches, we'd surely know about it
> because everyone using OpenJDK 6 packages is using them with these
> patches.
> 
> I agree it's a lot of wasted effort for no technical gain.  It would
> be simpler and easier to just stick with IcedTea.  But that does
> make OpenJDK 6 a bit pointless, to be frank.

I think we'll have to agree to differ on that question.

Andrew.