RFC: JDK 9 Sandbox Forest Proposal

[Joe Darcy]

I agree with Mike's assessment below: while this proposal as it stands 
may not directly support all desirable modes of working (branches 
spanning forests), it greatly simplifies many should-be-common ways of 
sharing and working on code.

I'd like to see us quickly go forward with this proposal, gain some 
experience with it, and then assess what adjustments might be helpful 
after a few months.

One reason I'd like to see the JDK organization uses branches for this 
project is so that branches could be included in our toolbox of features 
to use for multi-release work.

For example, I think it could be helpful if the 9 update releases were 
implemented in terms of branches in a 9 update forest, as opposed to the 
practice today in the JDK 8 update world where for a few months each 
release gets its own forest that is then soon abandoned after a few 
weeks. This could also enable the Hg tooling to be used to answer 
questions like "which update releases is this fix in?" rather than 
relying almost exclusively on the bug database for that information.

Cheers,

-Joe

On 9/22/2014 12:28 PM, Mike Duigou wrote:
> On Sep 22 2014, at 01:38 , Volker Simonis <volker.simonis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 4:41 PM, David Chase <david.r.chase at oracle.com> wrote:
>>>> - 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.
>>>
>> I'm also not familiar with branches. How do branches work in a
>> Mercurial forest? Is it possible to easily develop on a branch if you
>> need to push to different repositories within the whole sandbox forest
>> (i.e. hotspot and jdk). Is it somehow possible to enforce the smae
>> branch on all the repos in a forest?
> There is no specific support for branching across forests. This will need to be managed manually unless extensions like trees [1] can be adapted to do the necessary management across all repos.
>
>> I agree that the OpenJDK project
>> process is much too heavyweight for many smaller project, but in the
>> end you always get a complete forest. I'm just curious if cross
>> repository changes can be easily developed with branches.
> Though you do end up with a complete forest most patches/features only make changes in a single repo. For some people YMMV significantly of course. I expect that most people will only need to work with a single repo.
>
> Mike
>
> [1] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/code-tools/trees/raw-file/tip/trees.py
>
>
>> Thanks,
>> Volker
>>
>>> David
>>>