Proposal to revise forest graph and integration practices for JDK 9

[David Holmes]

On 25/11/2013 8:10 PM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 25/11/2013 08:50, David Holmes wrote:
>>
>> Again I disagree. To me the biggest flaw with the JDK roles are that
>> they are all encompassing - commiters can commit anything; reviewers
>> can review anything. At least the projects (jdk8, hsx) provided some
>> order on this so that generally library folk had roles related to
>> library code and hotspot folk had roles related to hotspot code.
>> Removing that distinction would be a step backwards to me.
> I don't understand this as you'd need 20+ merit badges to cover the
> breath of the JDK.

Obviously we're not going to go to that extent, but a single merit badge 
doesn't cut it either.

> Instead I would say that it is better to just trust
> people to do the right thing. That is, is seems unlikely a Committer
> would propose a patch to the register allocator (for example) on the
> beans-dev list and get a Reviewer that isn't smart enough to make sure
> that the hotspot compiler list is consulted. Clearly there will be
> mistakes made periodically, but that is no different to today. There's
> nothing like breaking something and getting balled out on a mailing list
> to learn a lesson.

But what you are describing is not rule based at all, so we are relying 
on people to do the right thing. In which case why do we need any roles 
or rules? If we know hotspot changes need hotspot reviewers then 
something should formalize that requirement - as it does today.

David

> -Alan.
>
>