Tracking dependencies between backport bugs

[Andrew Hughes]

On 09:41 Thu 07 Jan     , Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 02:54:48PM +0000, Lindenmaier, Goetz wrote:
> > I would not consider this a dependency between the bugs. 
> > There is no semantic connection between the two.
> > It's just a conflict in the context, right?
> 
> Thanks for your reply.  I agree entirely with the rest of your mail
> predicated on there being no semantic dependency. But unfortunately I
> think there is.
> 
> The "outer-most" bug adds a new labelled statement to a case statement
> that does not exist in 8u (introduced by the other patch). I'm not sure
> what issue that case label should related to (it's not relevant to the
> topic of JDK-8196196, tagging bugs @headful), but my concern would be
> that if I drop that hunk in this backport, and someone later comes along
> to backport JDK-8078614, this case label will never be added because
> both backports would be considered "done".
> 
> 
> -- 
> ���� Jonathan Dowland <jdowland at redhat.com>
> Senior Software Engineer, OpenJDK, Red Hat
> 

Definitely sounds like it should be backported.

It's bad form for the headful patch to be including additional changes,
but we should avoid discarding such hunks where possible.

This is also my concern with skipping files that are absent in 8u; if
someone later backports the fix that introduces that file, the later
change that was discarded in the earlier backport may never be added.

The Oracle parity patches are just suggestions as to what we may
wish to include. Just because a patch is in that list does not
mean it is a good idea for us to backport it as well, and, likewise,
there are plenty of patches we have included of our own volition.
We don't know the criteria Oracle apply for choosing to include
patches, and their reasoning may differ from ours.

The main concern with 8u is not to backport patches that are overly
disruptive or cause compatibility issues without a very good reason.
I don't think this applies to JDK-8078614.

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :)

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

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