JDK 8 Warnings Cleanup Day -- Dec. 1st, 2011

[Martijn Verburg]

Hi Stuart,

This is slightly faster timing than I anticipated, but we do have an
'Adopt the OpenJDK' program in the pipeline that (like the 'Adopt a
JSR' program) would start with the LJC (quickly followed by SouJava)
and then spread out globally to the other JUGs once we found an
efficient way of working with the OpenJDK community.

You can find the very early beginnings of the program at
http://java.net/projects/ljc-london-jug/pages/AdoptTheOpenJDKProgram

in-line responses follow.

> [I've removed jdk7-dev and build-dev]
>
> Hi Ben, Bruno, et al,
>
> I'm working with Xiomara on this Warnings Cleanup Day. Sorry for the short
> notice. For this effort we wanted to get something put together really
> quickly, mainly to see what happens, and also to see who might be
> interested. With such short notice the best we could hope for would be to
> get patches from a couple motivated individuals. That alone would be a great
> outcome.

As you saw from Mike Barker, you've got ~20 enthusiasts from London
:-).  23 minutes after we put up the impromptu event (with a limit of
20 places), it was full, so I think it's fair to say that there's the
potential here to get a lot done with JUG members (if channelled
correctly). The LJC this time around will organise itself with Mike
leading the effort and he'll gather together the results into a single
patch (or group of patches) so that you don't get 20 separate
submissions. This of course is slightly dependant on everyone getting
to the stage where they can build!

> For future efforts it would be great to get the JUGs involved! Of course,
> this would require more lead time and more planning effort. Would we try to
> get JUG events and an Oracle JDK developer event all on the same day? That
> would truly be an International Warnings Cleanup Day. Or would it be easier
> for individual JUGs to run their own individual events, and then to work
> with us to get the patches reviewed and tested? You tell me. We'd be happy
> to help support such efforts.

I think it might be difficult to have a single day where everyone does
the work.  However, if you nominated, say a 2-3 day period with a drop
dead date that you'll accept patches by, then that would work? That
way the JUGs can organise themselves to meet on a day that suits them.
 I think a dedicated IRC channel will also help where JUGs can provide
assistance to each other on a purely voluntary basis (I'm not
necessarily advocating or expecting core committers to be hanging out
there, but of course that would be welcome).

The other key factor is that there should be a single point of contact
within each JUG group who is the person most experienced with the
OpenJDK (and how the OpenJDK culture/workflow works) who can gather
together results/patches and send them in.  I think flooding you guys
would be counter productive.

> As for what to work on, I'm sure there will still be plenty of warnings
> remaining after this week's Cleanup Day. (Recent patches from Alan Bateman
> and Lance Andersen on core-libs-dev have pulled us below 10,000 by my
> count.) There are also warnings from findbugs, and there is also the
> potential to continue of the Coinification work that I did during JDK7
> development. So there's no shortage of stuff to work on.

This sort of low hanging yet numerous work is perfect for JUG
enthusiasts and hopefully some of those enthusiasts will be encouraged
to stick around and really get to know the OpenJDK and then give more
in depth contributions in the future.

> Of course, anybody can work on this stuff at any time, but it'd probably be
> much more fun (and more likely to get done) if it were done as part of some
> kind of event.

Definitely, it creates a real buzz and I think there are a bunch of
developers who are secretly scared of the OpenJDK and would prefer to
approach it in a team as part of an event for the first time :-).

That's my initial ideas on it anyhow, thoughts?

Cheers,
Martijn