JDK 7 Updates: Policy Changes

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> On 07/23/2015 03:20 PM, dalibor topic wrote:
> > 
> >> we can point people to the bug database to file bugs. As far as I'm aware,
> >> the OpenJDK bug database is only accessible to OpenJDK committers, so this
> >> would be a blocker to using it for the OpenJDK 7 project.
> > 
> > That's not quite correct:
> > 
> > "An individual with at least one OpenJDK Project role of Author or
> > higher has sufficient cause to get a JBS account. A JBS account grants
> > an individual general read and write access to issues, including the
> > ability to file new issues, transitioning issues among the states of the
> > workflow, adding comments, changing field values (including adding and
> > removing labels). The holder of a JBS account can also be the assignee
> > of an issue."
> 

Close enough.

"An Author for a Project is a Contributor who has been granted the right
to create changesets intended to be pushed into a specific Project’s code
repositories, but does not have the right to push such changesets directly."

http://openjdk.java.net/bylaws#author

Unlike with the other roles, it's not clear how someone is "granted the
right". There's no voting process as described for committers, etc.

My point was that, if I'm discussing an issue with someone via e-mail
and/or IRC, I can't ask them to go and make a bug unless they're already
involved in the OpenJDK development process and have been awarded this
author role somehow. In contrast, someone can file an IcedTea bug by
signing up with an e-mail address.

> So, the situation with OpenJDK 7 would be as with other projects, and
> people don't need to be, say, JDK9 committers to modify bug reports.
> And we can grant Author status to suitably-qualified contributors to
> OpenJDK 7.

Can we? As I say, it's not clear how this is done. I also don't believe
someone should first need to be "a suitably-qualified contributor" to
file a bug report. People testing and filing issues are just as valuable
as those fixing them.

Other development projects, yes. I think the potential bug reporters for
a package which is installed on many user's desktops (java-1.7.0-openjdk
and the like in other distros) is different from that of something
like Shenandoah, which are still experimental and where they'd probably
have had to build it themselves first.

> 
> It has the downside that end-users can't create bugs, but that's no
> different from the other OpenJDK projects.  Sure, it'd be nice to get
> that fixed for all projects.

It's different from the IcedTea bugzilla and our existing OpenJDK 6 JIRA,
which are closer equivalents of OpenJDK 7.  It's also different from what
OpenJDK 7 had before, where bugs could enter the database via Oracle's
reporting system.

I don't think it's something that will ever be "fixed". It's done by
design so that bugs for Oracle's binaries have to go through their
triaging system first.

I'm hearing lots of downsides, but I have yet to hear any benefits
of using the OpenJDK bug system over the existing system we have
for OpenJDK 6, which has worked well for the last couple of years.

> 
> Andrew.
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

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

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