Proposal to revise forest graph and integration practices for JDK 9

[Joe Darcy]

On 12/02/2013 03:34 PM, Dan Smith wrote:
> On Dec 1, 2013, at 10:04 PM, Joe Darcy <joe.darcy at oracle.com> wrote:
>
>>> One thing missing from the proposal is jdk9 repository layout within the forests. I think that this may be good opportunity to simplify the current historically grown structure, for example by folding the nashorn and langtools repositories together, as well as corba, jaxp, jaxws and jdk.
>> Yes, that would be another level of reorganization to discuss.
> What I'd like to see here, and I think what's probably the general preference, is a single repository.  I've got nothing against having as many subdirectories of jdk9 as necessary, but they don't need to be separate repositories.  I'm not aware of any advantages to the forest approach, and it has some pretty annoying downsides (e.g., the project is less accessible to new participants; commits to separate subdirectories aren't serialized; work across multiple subdirectories is tedious).
>
> (I do recognize that: i) this is orthogonal to the changes originally proposed in this thread, and ii) there may be technical challenges that make this a nontrivial project.)
>
> —Dan

Just a quick note of historical perspective on this point, which was 
also raised previously by Andrew.

In some ways, the JDK repositories are a downstream consumer of upstream 
versions of jaxp, javaws, and corba.

There have been various code management issues in those areas over the 
years, some of them predating OpenJDK, such as a sync with upstream 
losing local changes in the JDK repo, etc. (Or from the perspective of 
the other project, JDK changes not being fed upstream.) The source 
bundle mechanism for jaxp and jax-ws from several years ago, now 
abandoned, was an effort to address some of these issues.

Since that time, the primary distribution of jaxp has become the JDK 
version and there is improved coordination with jax-ws. The corba 
headwaters dried up many years ago. (There are several long-diverged 
versions of corba, one in the JDK another in EE; there has been some 
consideration of merging these versions, but the effort would be 
nontrivial.)

The separate repositories for corba, jaxp, and jax-ws were put in place 
to reflect these differences in code origin and handling; however, I 
agree it is worthwhile to contemplate a repository consolidation, at 
least for all the libraries-related repos (jdk, corba, jaxp, jaxws).

-Joe