[8u-communication] New Project Lead discussion

[Andrew Haley]

On 1/23/19 11:10 PM, Seán Coffey wrote:

> To help transition this Project to a new Lead, I'd like to invite
> JDK 8 Updates Project Committers and Reviewers who are not currently
> employed by Oracle to nominate themselves for this technically
> challenging role by replying to this mail.  Please describe your
> contributions to the Project to date and give an indication of your
> future plans for this Project. Self nominations should be submitted
> before 30th January 2019.

Thank you. I am willing to perform that role. I lead the OpenJDK 7
project and have in the past led OpenJDK 6u and the AArch64 port. I
have personally contributed 145 patches to OpenJDK, in many areas but
mostly HotSpot. I wrote a substantial chunk of the AArch64 port. I am
a community representative on the OpenJDK Governing Board, and have
been since its inception.

Perhaps most importantly, I have the Java Platform group at Red Hat --
a team of about twenty engineers -- supporting me. I couldn't do it
without them.

With regard to future plans, my Rule 0 is "first, do no harm": OpenJDK
8 is a crucial part of many organization's infrastructure, and we must
not break it.

I don't intend to do anything radically different from the way that
OpenJDK 8 updates has been run until now, and the processes will not
change in a substantial way.  Having said that, I expect OpenJDK 8
updates will be more active than 6 and 7 have been: there is a demand
for backports of significant features. I will invite such backports
and will allow them if they make sense and we can be sure that nothing
will break. I don't intend to be a dictator: we should reach consensus
on such decisions.

Testing backports is going to be tricky. I've been discussing this
with several organizations including AdoptOpenJDK and Amazon Web
Services, all keen to help. We already have extensive test suites, and
we will work together to improve them.

Security is an important issue. We have a healthy OpenJDK
Vulnerability Group, and will work with them to ensure that OpenJDK 8
remains secure. Critical updates will be done quarterly, as they have
been throughout the life of OpenJDK 8.

-- 
Andrew Haley
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
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