[jdk8u-dev] RFR: 8208655: use JTreg skipped status in hotspot tests [v2]

[Andrew John Hughes]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2023 18:37:26 GMT, Severin Gehwolf <sgehwolf at openjdk.org> wrote:

> This is a large change. If it wasn't only in the testing area, then this would be hard to argue to get in. GHA looks OK. Thumbs up.

If it wasn't only in the testing area, I wouldn't submit this kind of change for a backport. Making such changes to the codebase is a risk to stability. But, on the other hand, *not* improving the test suite where we can is also a risk to stability.  To me, the two (sources and tests) are quite different things that happen to share the same repository.

In GNU Classpath, we actually used to have the test suite as a separate independent repository, which I think was a better approach. Yes, it's harder to make sure things in there work appropriately on each JDK version, but it means each version is using the latest tests and would cut down on a huge amount of backporting work. 8u's version of the test suite is still quite immature compared with where trunk is now, so it's not a surprise that there are backports like this.

Note also that this is not one change, but seven. I could have filed them all as separate PRs but, as I said to Thomas, it doesn't really make sense. I don't know how 8208655 was accepted in the state it's in, because it has a whole host of things like typos and missing import statements that are fixed in subsequent changes, but should have been caught by running the tests before commit (that's how I found them and then the fixes). So I think what we have here is much closer to how 8208655 should have been to begin with.

Thanks both of you for the reviews. I know it's not easy on larger changes.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk8u-dev/pull/387#issuecomment-1826090851