JDK 7 is Feature-Complete

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 2 February 2011 12:12, Volker Simonis <volker.simonis at gmail.com> wrote:
> My initial question was indeed if there will be separate HSX release
> trains for JDK6 and JDK7 after  the release of JDK7.
>
> I think Erik mostly answered the question and I personally also think
> that one HSX train from JDK8 to JDK6 AND JDK7 would be the most
> natural and reasonable solution. But of course this is up to Oracle to
> decide on this...
>
> Thank you for the answers and best regards,
> Volker
>

Can we please clarify some terms here?  I'm not sure what you're
referring to by 'JDK6/7/8'.  Is this OpenJDK6/7/8?  Or Oracle's
proprietary JDK6/7/8?

My reading of Erik's e-mail is that it talks about Oracle's
proprietary release plans and NOT plans for OpenJDK.  While this is
interesting, this is an OpenJDK discussion list and as such, these
trees should be our primary concern here.  I would assume the same
existing process of the HotSpot developers creating a stable tree will
continue to apply, and this can be pulled into OpenJDK7 as we do now
for OpenJDK6.  Is this correct?

I guess my most important concern is what level of support Oracle has
planned for OpenJDK7 (specifically  the CORBA/JAXP/JAXWS/JDK/langtools
trees) once it branches and OpenJDK8 development starts.  Are we going
to see the same low/non-existent work we've seen with OpenJDK6?  While
Joe Darcy does a  great job of maintaining this tree, there seems to
be little involvement from anyone else at Oracle, to the point that
I've seen a few posts from Oracle engineers who have no knowledge of
what is happening with OpenJDK6.   This has meant that backports are
only been done on a sporadic basis as we at Red Hat find them and
suggest them for backport, whereas it would be much more efficient if
this was considered by the original engineer at the time they pushed
the patch.  As a case in point, I'm currently working on backporting a
patch (6725214) that is nearly three years old.

Can we hope for something better this time round with OpenJDK7, given
Oracle should finally be working on the same codebase?

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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