[7u-communication] OpenJDK 7u60: Scope & Milestones

[Dalibor Topic]

I provided some initial information on the planned 7u60 timeline a little while ago. [1] 
I'd like to pick up that thread, and provide some more details on the planned scope and milestones.

As always, please note that these plans for OpenJDK 7u60 are preliminary and subject to change.

As a vehicle for introducing new features into JDK releases, the OpenJDK 7u Project had
a great run breaking new ground - integrating a whole new port of OpenJDK 7 to OS X, for
example. But, as you can see from last week's message, the timing of the planned GA
for 7u60 puts it after the planned GA date of JDK 8.[2]

The focus of this OpenJDK 7u release should be on plain old bug fixes as a lot of the OpenJDK
Contributors' and Java developers' attention in the coming months will be focused on the more
revolutionary new features being introduced in JDK 8.

The way OpenJDK 7u has been set up, it has a very close relationship with the JDK 8
Project - that's where most of the changes in this Project have been backported from.
As a close look at the JDK 8 Project's Milestones [3] reveals, the bar for acceptable
changes has been quickly getting higher on the way towards its Final Release Candidate.
With the focus in JDK 8 set to shift exclusively to showstopper issues soon - what does
that mean for this Project?

We could continue to go on as with previous releases, accumulating all kinds of bug fixes
for 7u60 into the always open jdk7u-dev forests, until a 7u60 forest is created. But 
that would mean that we'd end up with many, potentially hundreds of non-showstopper 
fixes in 7u60 that would eventually need to be forward ported into a JDK 8 update.

Given that 7u60 is one of the first 7u releases that users would be able to consider migrating
to JDK 8 from, I think it's important that 7u60 does not end up being radically different
from JDK 8 in terms of the issues already fixed, to avoid forcing users to pick between
revolutionary new features on one side, and more bug fixes on the other.

So instead, I'd like to propose that OpenJDK 7u adopts a similarly high bar for acceptable
changes for 7u60 from now on, to reduce the potential for undesirable divergences between 
this 7u release and JDK 8.

In practice, that means marking issues you'd like to integrate into jdk7u-dev with
the 7u60-critical-request label in the JDK Bug System, and only once the integration has
been approved by the JDK Release Team through marking it as 7u60-critical-approved, sending an
e-mail request to this mailing list to get the approval from one of the OpenJDK 7u Maintainers
to push the actual changeset. Please use the Phase 2 approval request template [5] for that purpose.

That is very similar to the existing Phase 2 process [4], with the major difference being that
there would be no separate OpenJDK 7u60 forest (for now), and therefore jdk7u-dev would no longer 
be open for arbitrary changes for 7u60 - just to those that have been marked as 
7u60-critical-approved in the JDK Bug System.

For other kinds of changes, I believe that a future JDK 9 Project would provide a better
initial home for them than this Project or JDK 8, considering the JDK 8 milestone schedule.

In terms of milestones, the proposed OpenJDK 7u60 time line would be

    Feb 2013 - Feature Complete
    Mar 2013 - All Tests Run
    Apr 2013 - Zero Bug Bounce
    May 2013 - GA

For a definition of the milestone terminology, please see the JDK 8 milestone page [3].

cheers,
dalibor topic

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk7u-dev/2013-November/008040.html
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/milestones
[4] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7u/phase2/phase2-process.html
[5] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7u/phase2/phase2-approval-template.html
 

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