OpenJDK adoption by Java User Groups

[Rémi Forax]

On 12/09/2011 11:16 AM, Martijn Verburg wrote:
>>> Martijn,
>>>
>>> There were a number of surprises on Warnings Day last week.
>>> One was the amount of enthusiasm. Another was the difficulty of
>>> staying within the prescribed bounds, such as "no public API changes".
>>>
>>> Which brings me to a suggestion I've been meaning to make for a
>>> while, and is relevant here.
>>>
>>> For changes to the OpenJDK code itself, you can see the sort of
>>> controls we go through to make sure nothing bad happens. That can
>>> be somewhat limiting for folk who want more creative freedom ;-)
>>> One possibility is the development of tools which are not themselves
>>> part of the OpenJDK itself, but which are useful to folk working on
>>> OpenJDK. One such category of tools is intelligent comparison tools.
>>> Given two copies of a library (such as rt.jar and tools.jar), analyze
>>> them to report on differences. A bunch of different comparison
>>> tests could be done:
>>> -- have any public API signatures changed (where "public" means
>>>     "documented/published")
>>> -- have any public API signatures changed (where "public" means
>>>     the Java access modifier)
>>> -- if any signatures have changed, are the changes binary compatible,
>>>    source compatible, etc.
>>>    [See http://blogs.oracle.com/darcy/entry/kinds_of_compatibility]
>>> -- have any method bodies changed
>>> -- and so on
>>>
>>> I wonder it would make sense for interested groups, such as JUGs,
>>> to team up and take on such projects.
>>>
>>> -- Jon
>> We could certainly list projects like this on a Adopt OpenJDK site and
>> work with
>> the JUG leaders to put together teams.  There's never any guarantee that a
>> particular project will get picked up, but with such a diverse group
>> of developers there would hopefully be some sort of adoption yes.
> To add further to this, please send myself or Mike Barker any ideas you'd
> like to see tackled and we'll get them added to the list.
>
> Cheers,
> Martijn

There is already something like this in the test of ASM (google ASM java).
It allows us, developers of ASM to maintain 1.3 compatibility by checking
against a public description of the 1.3 API.

Rémi