Proposal to revise forest graph and integration practices for JDK 9

[Joe Darcy]

On 11/24/2013 5:05 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 23/11/2013 22:08, Omair Majid wrote:
>> :
>> Could you elaborate on what is a 'breakage'? Would, say, a changeset
>> that (unintentionally) makes hotspot fail to build on arm using zero
>> constitute a breakage? Would a patch that fails causes non-closed builds
>> to fail constitute breakage?
>>
>> Any ideas about what would constitute a 'prompt' response? Obviously for
>> a patch that breaks all builds, prompt might be a few hours.
>>
> The jdk8/tl forest is one of the busiest integration forests today and 
> when there is a build breakage (OpenJDK or Oracle builds) then folks 
> tend to pounce on the issues quickly. There are many examples in the 
> last year to point at. Frequently red faced individuals resolve 
> mistakes before anyone notices (oops, forgot to "hg add" new files), 
> sometimes it can be hours or days before a breakage is noticed 
> (breaking boot cycle builds for example). So I would say that we've 
> always had a culture that fixes build issues quickly. Clearly there 
> will be cases where individuals see breakage because they using 
> different tool chains or environments and I think the onus needs to be 
> on those individuals to raise issues in a timely manner.
>
> In any case, as you bring up the Zero port then I assume you are 
> thinking about ports and build variants that many people might not be 
> building on a regular basis. Once the AIX port is pushed then I can 
> imagine us periodically breaking the port and it needing SAP or IBM 
> engineers to fix up the issues. Having continuous builds or build+test 
> infrastructure that cover all possible platforms and build variations 
> would help but it might be too much to require everyone touching the 
> build or doing platform or architecture code specific to keep 
> everything working all of the time. Whether this means that "some 
> animals are more equal than others" isn't clear to me but as OpenJDK 
> takes on more ports then I can imagine this being a topic that needs 
> further discussion.
>

I would see build or test breakage in some platforms / environments as 
being more severe than in others. So I would expect a, say, Linux x64 
problem to be treated with more global urgency than a more niche 
combination. Another implicit question is urgent for whom? For ports, 
the team working on the port often assumes more responsibility for 
resolving such issues than main-line developers.

-Joe