JDK 7 status: Rampdown

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

We're past the "All targeted bugs addressed" milestone of 11 May, per
the high-level schedule posted back in January [1].  We're currently
analyzing about 70 open bugs.  We expect to defer most of these to a
future release but a few will likely be fixed in JDK 7.

As of this Wednesday, 18 May, only fixes to showstopper bugs will be
accepted.  Categories of showstopper bugs include:

  - JCK failures
  - High-priority feedback on in-flight JSRs
  - Hard crashes or loss-of-data bugs likely to occur in the field

If you find what you believe to be a showstopper bug then please report
it via the usual channel [2].  If you have a fix for such a bug, please
work with an Oracle engineer to get it approved and integrated.

I've updated the JDK 7 home page, feature list, and milestone schedule
pages accordingly.  There are two minor feature updates:

  - The Gervill sound synthesizer was integrated early in JDK 7 but
    due to a clerical error never made it onto the feature list; and

  - The "Enhanced JMX Agent and MBeans" feature has been reduced to
    "Enhanced MBeans"; the JMX Agent work was not completed in time.

Finally, as I've said before: The JDK 7 development process has not been
as transparent as many people (me included) would have preferred.  We've
made some changes to address that, but we've had to balance the cost of
making significant process changes against the goal of releasing JDK 7
this summer.  In the longer term I fully intend to make the various JDK
8 planning and development activities much more transparent, from the
beginning.

- Mark


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/
[2] http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/