Draft Bulk Changes Proposal

[David Holmes]

Hi Dalibor,

On 14/07/2011 12:11 PM, Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Another one on my list is a draft for bulk changes. Since some of the components used in JDK 7 come from other places (JAX*, Corba, HSX), they tend to get updated in bulk fashion, and to live in their repositories. Since bulk changes tend to be large, and to be applicable to both JDK 8 and JDK 7, the preferred route is to submit them for inclusion into JDK 7 Updates along or after their submission into JDK 8. Since components that get updated in bulk fashion tend to live in their own repositories in the JDK 7 forest, Rule 0 allows the maintainer to designate forests as open for bulk changes. Bulk changes can be disruptive, so Rule 2 ensures that the forest's maintainer can coordinate with the relevant stakeholders before a bulk change is pushed into a forest, and finally Rule 3 sets expectations regarding quality of submitted bulk changes.
>
> Bulk changes:
>
> Preamble: An example of bulk changes would be an update to a new HotSpot version, security fixes, or updates to JAXP, JAX-WS, or Corba.
>
> Rule 0: A maintainer MAY designate one or more repositories in their forest as open for bulk changes. In that case, the maintainer MUST describe the kind of acceptable bulk changes.
>
> Rule 1: Bulk changes that are submitted for a JDK 7 Update forest along with or after their submission into JDK 8 don't require additional code review.

Not clear what this means. Take hotspot as an example. Various fixes and 
enhancements go into the current hsx forest to be included in the next 
mainline release (JDK8) as well as the next update releases (6uN and 7uN). 
When 7u2 for example is in a suitable state of readiness the hsx repository 
will be forked into a 7u2 repository and that would form the "bulk update" 
that I assume is being referred to here. But such changes might need 
additional review to ensure that they apply correctly for the update 
environment - for example they may need to be conditional on a runtime check 
of the JDK version. It may not have been obvious at the time of the original 
commit as to which JDK versions the change has to be applicable to.

Cheers,
David Holmes

> Rule 2: Bulk changes, like any other changes submitted to a JDK 7 Update forest, MUST be approved by the forest's maintainer before they can be pushed.
>
> Rule 3: The submitter MUST make sure there are no build errors on the supported platforms for the release they're working on, and that any included or otherwise applicable tests pass without failures on all relevant platforms.
>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic