Tracking dependencies between backport bugs

[Jonathan Dowland]

Happy New Year!

I'm picking up work on backporting JDK-8196196, which is one of those
large test-tagging patches. The current WIP backport patch drops about
half of the original patch. In line with prior discussions, I'm now
investigating whether the hunks that don't apply in 8u shed light on
some other patches that should be backported first.

The first concrete example for this bug is the file
test/javax/swing/JComboBox/6632953/bug6632953.java, for which the hunk
does not apply in 8u yet, because JDK-8078614
("WindowsClassicLookAndFeel : MetalComboBoxUI.getbaseLine fails with
IllegalArgumentException") needs to be applied first. I personally think that
JDK-8078614 looks suitable for backporting to 8u, although it might fail
on the criteria (it's not an Oracle parity patch I don't think?)

My question is: (how) should I record this dependency in JBS?

 * Should I create a Backport bug for JDK-8078614, and then mark that as
   a blocker against the backport bug for JDK-8196196 (this already
   exists, it's JDK-8257838).

Note that I'm not sure that I will work on this dependent bug myself (in
particular this is a Windows-only bug: although it looks trivial enough
I can probably test it to satisfaction, in general I can't work on
Window specific bugs). For now I just want to capture all the
dependencies of the main backport I'm looking at.


Best wishes

-- 
���� Jonathan Dowland <jdowland at redhat.com>
Senior Software Engineer, OpenJDK, Red Hat