JEP 138: Autoconf-Based Build System

[Alan Bateman]

On 22/02/2012 10:49, Erik Joelsson wrote:
> When we state that supporting IDEs is a non goal, we mean that we will 
> not make an effort to improve the support over what is already there. 
> It's an important goal that we don't regress functionality or workflows.
>
> If the langtools team is happy keeping a separate IDE configuration 
> parallel to the main build implementation, then we will not force you 
> into doing it differently. We believe that some other teams might 
> appreciate generation of IDE configurations from the build scripts and 
> if that is desired, it will likely be a follow-on project.
>
> /Erik
IDE support is clearly desirable but I think the focus for the short 
team needs to be on bringing the good work that is happening in the 
build-infra project into jdk8 so that folks can start to get experience 
and confidence with it. To that end, having a transition period where 
both the old and new make files co-exist makes sense and really a 
necessity as it's going to take a while for the new build to bed down.

I actually suspect that IDE support could be a tricky project, assuming 
that IDE support means being able to build the entire JDK, VM, native 
libraries, source file generated in the build and all the other 
complicated steps that the build entails. In addition I think things 
will get complicated once the JDK moves to modules as there will be a 
lag before all the IDEs understand this world.

-Alan