JDK 7u4 is now GA

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> On 5/1/12 12:58 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> > which says there is "about a month or so left".  Then a release
> > appears
> > about two months later.  Am I missing something?
> 
> Hard to say. I think that the JavaOne strategy keynotes in Moscow &
> Tokio in April
> narrowed that down to 'by the end of the month', which was pretty
> much when it was
> released.
> 

That's not that helpful to those who weren't at these keynotes.  Why was
a more recent update not given on this list?

> Historically, work on 7u2 in OpenJDK began in July, with a release in
> December, so
> it took about 6 months. Historically, work on 7u4 began with the 7u2
> rampdown, i.e. in
> September, with a release in April, so it took about 8 months. But
> then 7u4 also brought
> in a new port for the first time in a long time. So you have
> historically 6-8 months
> as the time it took to deliver a JDK 7 Update release from the first
> changes making
> their way into the repos to the final source code tarball.
> 
> Historically, rampdown on 7u2 began in September, with a release in
> December, so
> that phase took about 3 months. Historically, rampdown on 7u4 began
> in February,
> with a release in April, so that phase took about 2 months. So you
> have historically
> 2-3 months as the time it took to deliver a JDK 7 Update release from
> the start of
> the rampdown phase.
> 
> The other aspect of release timing you can look at are CPU releases -
> their dates are
> publicly known well ahead of time. See
> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html
> for details.
> 
> If you line the JDK 7 Updates releases so far, you get:
> 
> 7u1: October '11 (CPU)
> 7u2: December '11
> 7u3: February '12 (CPU)
> 7u4: April '12
> 
> so it seems like we have had an approximately 2 month cadence over
> the past couple of releases.
> 
> Obviously, I can't say whether that will continue in that same
> fashion, as I can't predict
> the future, but I hope this helps you get a rough idea about the
> timing of the previous
> releases.
> 

Sure, I can make the same guesses and interpolations from the past.
But I was assuming that Oracle would have some kind of release process in
place and that it wasn't some kind of random event that I had to try
and predict.  Is this not the case?

With IcedTea, we notify people on the mailing list about a week before
a planned release date so they can get fixes in on time.  Then we update
further if that date needs to be changed.  Is the same not possible for
jdk7 updates?

It makes it very hard to plan downstream packaging of OpenJDK if the release
process is not transparent.  Dates are provided for security updates and so we
can work around them as appropriate.  Why can this not be done for the other
updates?

> cheers,
> dalibor topic
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-- 
Andrew :)

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

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