Happy Holidays (also, JMC 7 branched)!

[Marcus Hirt]

Hi all,

First of all I would like to wish you all happy holidays and a happy new year! 
My vacation starts tomorrow, but before then I thought I’d try to sum up a few 
thoughts around the last couple of months since JMC was open sourced. 

First of all I would like to thank everyone who has taken an active interest
in JMC. There are now, at the time of writing, 14 contributors listed in the 
JMC project census[1], and there are more contributors in the pipe to be added. 
Most are backed by companies, like Oracle and Red Hat, but there are also 
people that spend their spare time contributing.

Next I think we all deserve a pat on the back for almost being done with JMC 7.
It is a release with many firsts:

* First JMC release to be based on an open sourced Mission Control [2]
* First JMC release to ship with its own embedded runtime[3]
* First JMC release to use common open source build tools, like Maven/Tycho
* First JMC release to ship the core bundles to Maven Central[4]
* First JMC with contributions from outside of Oracle

And probably a whole host of other firsts I cannot think of right now. And, as
any release with many firsts, it has been challenging. We still have some work
ahead of us before we can ship JMC 7, but I am pretty confident we can (barring
any process hick-ups) get the release out on time.

Finally I'd like to mention that JMC 7 have now been branched[5]. The mainline 
repo[6] is now the JMC 7.1 release.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

Kind regards,
Marcus


[1] http://openjdk.java.net/census#jmc
[2] http://hirt.se/blog/?p=944
[3] https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/java-mission-control-now-serving-openjdk-binaries-too
[4] https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/org/openjdk/jmc/
[5] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jmc/jmc7/
[6] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jmc/jmc/