Need help testing the EA builds

[Stephen Felts]

This will be a significant problem for a lot of people with respect to tools not working.
Gradle junit - basic problem fixed in upcoming release
Jython
Ant - certain cases with classloader
JDT - doesn't work at all
Asm - never tracked down issue
Jmockit
Simplestub

Of course, these are problems that I don't have a workaround for.  I'm currently exporting 25 packages, have 30 patch files, two module jars, and two upgrade jars, setting both command line options and undocumented loader options, playing tricks to get the gradle daemon to run, etc.  And because of these problems that I don't have a workaround for, we can't run any tests, either unit or functional, so coverage is almost non-existent and I don't know what else is broken.




-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Bateman 
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2016 10:01 AM
To: jigsaw-dev
Subject: Need help testing the EA builds


We are starting to think through how to bring the module system that is the monster patch in jigsaw/jake forest into the JDK 9 main line.

There are many reasons to do this. One reason is to reduce testing effort. Another is to reduce the cost of sync ups as it takes a lot of effort each week to merge in the changes from JDK 9. We also have confused some developers by having two early access (EA) builds, one EA build with Project Jigsaw, the other without. It should also be obvious that time is moving on and we don't want to be rushing things right before JDK 9 Feature Complete.

Merging into the JDK 9 main line will be a big step and there are many things that need to be done to make this happen. The proposal will most likely be to take snapshot of what we have in jake and bring it into JDK
9 after stabilization, testing and of course review. Once it is in JDK 9 then we'll continue to iterate and work through the many issues that need attention.

One thing that would be useful is to get as many people as possible to try out the EA builds [1]. It really helps confidence when there is confirmation that existing libraries and applications work as before. If there are bugs or issues that involve any of the supported interfaces then we want to know. We know well that there are several compatibility issues and we've attempted to capture those in the Risks and Assumption section of JEP 261 [2].

We also interested in bug reports and issues from those trying out the EA builds to create their own modules or migrating existing code or libraries to modules. Bonus points for those brave enough to try out some of the many new APIs too.

-Alan

[1] https://jdk9.java.net/jigsaw/
[2] http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/261