RFC: JDK 9 Sandbox Forest Proposal

[David Chase]

I vote yes, I have some feedback/questions on the proposal:

On 2014-09-19, at 1:15 PM, Mike Duigou <mike.duigou at oracle.com> wrote:
> Goals: 
> 
> - Open          : Use OpenJDK public infrastructure
> - Low-friction  : Minimal start-cost and no delays

I ran into one specific problem attempting to add stuff to
jdk libraries as part of Panama, which is that the creation
of a new module is error-prone.  In my case, it is only
error-prone, I never succeeded, I assume I missed some
crucial step.  I think we want people to be able to work in
this style because at least one of the IDE tools (NetBeans)
can sometimes get confused when working with a subset of the
source files in java.base.  (and even when it works, it’s another
little speedbump on the way to configure NetBeans to work
properly in this case)

So I think we need to address this and write up a recipe,
including the need to regenerate configure files etc before
commit.  Ideally the recipe will contain copy-and-pasteable
commands where that is possible.

> Specifics:

> - Neither jcheck nor hgupdater is enabled for this forest.

Do we want something like jcheck to keep the code moderately
clean — for example, there’s the personal “fixit” script
I’ve informally put up for consideration for Codetools (it’s
not a commit hook, it merely checks a bunch of source code
rules and gives you the the option of an automated fix). 
This is purely a matter of keeping code clean, on the off
chance that we do include some of it in a future release.

> - All development happens on branches.

It would be lovely to have a short tutorial on how we do
this written up and put in an easy-to-access place.
Branching still makes me nervous.

David