[7u communication] Changes to JDK 7u10 plans

[Dalibor Topic]

On 10/3/12 11:18 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> So, are you now saying there *may* be some fixes in the proprietary u10 release
> which are applicable to OpenJDK?

No. I don't speculate about the content of future non-OpenJDK releases, regardless 
whether they are from Oracle, IcedTea, etc. Despite my good looks, I can't predict
the future, so I don't even bother trying.

Typically downstream Projects based off 7u end up using the source code in 7u as the 
basis and, if they are in the mood for it, adding changes of their own to it. 

A good example is IcedTea, which in a typical release (see http://markmail.org/message/st2d3zjccucgz6tb) 
will include additional fixes that take it "beyond" a particular 7u forest it was 
based off. It's impossible for me to predict which fixes, if any, those would be 
ahead of time, since the decisions about their inclusion into IcedTea are not made 
here, they are made  downstream, in the IcedTea Project. And that's fine, too. It 
also is true for any downstream.

Which brings us back to your initial question - what the IcedTea release corresponding 
to 7u11 could be based on. One option is a future IcedTea release corresponding to 7u9. 
Another option is 7u-dev, as you mentioned yourself. Another option is to cherry-pick 
fixes from jdk7u-dev that you care about. And so on - I'm sure you can come up with more.
I don't know which option is best for IcedTea. I would, though, if in doubt, go for 
whichever seems to be the lowest risk one in the context of IcedTea.

> Also, why aren't there trees for e.g. u3, u5, etc. (the security CPUs)?

I'll quote from this Project's Q&A web page:

"As with OpenJDK 6, security fixes are first kept confidential and applied to a private 
forest before being pushed to the public forest as part of the general synchronized 
publication of the fix to affected JDK release trains."

> This gives the impression that 7u is not meant for direct use, but only as a basis
> for something else like IcedTea, if we're going to have releases with no applicable
> tree, or even tag, and security fixes are applied to a mid-stream feature release.

That depends on the point of view. We don't publish binaries, so from one point of view,
there is nothing you can use directly - you need to build your own binaries, or find a 
downstream that does that for you, like Oracle JDK. From another point of view, the 
releases created by this Project are well usable on its own, once you've ran make (and I'm
a happy user). From yet another point of view, that's not something you'd want to run as 
a a non-technical user, because it lacks additional features like plugin, web start, etc.

So, in practice, it depends on one's perspective. I would expect most users of 7u to run 
a binary published downstream, though.

> I'd really like to see a situation where, for all releases, there is a specific point
> on a specific tree that can be used to download the source for that release, as in most
> other FOSS projects.

We already provide that for releases developed in this Project. See http://jdk7.java.net/source.html
for the links for 7u6, which was the last release developed in this Project.

cheers,
dalibor topic
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