Proposal to revise forest graph and integration practices for JDK 9

[Jeremy Manson]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Andrew <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > Is it worth formalizing the permission system?  That is, only a select
> > group of people would be allowed to give permission to check into any
> given
> > directory, and said permission can be granted by those people to others,
> on
> > a change by change basis?
> >
> > I don't know how to write a Mercurial extension, but I bet someone could
> > come up with one that allowed a select group of people to provide
> > permission for a third party to commit a particular changeset to a
> > directory.  There is already an ACL extension.
> >
>
> That sounds like a maintenance nightmare.  Also, I know I for one have
> probably
> committed to most forests at one time or another.  All this grouping seems
> based
> on internal Oracle groups which have no relevance to those of us outside.
>

Presumably, such a system would have more to do with OpenJDK membership
than Oracle groupings.

One big benefit of being able to check in code anywhere is that you can do
global cleanups (warnings and the like) across the entire codebase without
getting permission from everyone.  One big drawback is that if a team has a
rigorous test that they want to run before any checkin (I believe that
Hotspot has some non-open tests they like to run before non-trivial
changes), then having other people able to make changes to their code base
without running those tests may cause some pain.

I suppose that the main question is, with a 10MLOC codebase, and scores of
developers, do you trust everyone with a committer bit to do the right
thing all of the time?  The answer might very well be yes.

Jeremy