[gnu.andrew at redhat.com: Re: OpenJDK 8u and Backport Bugs]

[Andrew Hughes]

On 18:20 Thu 17 Dec     , Hohensee, Paul wrote:
> I should have written, "The assignee for an automatically generated backport issue is the original patch author, not the person doing the backport." See, e.g., https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8256904, which is the 8u backport issue for https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8255603. The backport issue's assignee is clanger, not the person who did the backport push, who was phh. Manually created backports can of course be assigned to anyone, but assigning them to anyone other the original patch author is a change from current practice.
> 
> Thanks,
> Paul
> 

There is no current practice for manually created backports, because
we haven't been using them :)

If you mean the current practice for the changeset author for a
backport, which becomes the assignee of the auto-generated backport
bug, then the current practice is more convoluted than just "use the
original patch author":

"The change can now be committed & pushed to the appropriate jdk8u-dev
repository. If you don't have committer or above status, someone will
need to to do so on your behalf. Patches that apply cleanly or only
need a few minor changes which don't alter the code (e.g. copyright
header fixes, same changes in a different context) should use the
original author & reviewers for the commit. If the fix was reviewed,
those reviewers should be appended to the end of the list. If
substantial code changes were needed to create the 8u fix, authorship
should go to the backporter and reviewers should only list those who
reviewed the altered patch." [0]

For what it's worth, the practice used by Oracle, who have been using
manual backport bugs for some time, seems to be to assign to the
backporter.

Moreover, the backport bug assignee does not need to match the
changeset author. The entire point of creating backport bugs ahead
of time is to assign them to the person working on them. Assigning
them to the author of the original changeset, who may have no
interest in working on a backport, doesn't make any sense.

[0] https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/jdk8u/Main
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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