[nicl] moving forward

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Hi,
I've just created a new Panama branch, called 'foreign'. We plan to use 
this branch (which initially is just an alias of the 'nicl' branch) to 
bring the native interoperability support in sync with what described in 
a document I shared earlier [1].

This process will be roughly structured in the following steps:

* add public layout API to panama repo

* tweak the binder internals to work on top of the public layout API, 
rather than in terms of internal classes

* tweak jextract to emit the new annotations/layout descriptions as per [1].

We expect this to be a somewhat bumpy process, and it is possible that 
the branch won't even build at times, while we're busy hacking with the 
code. Once the implementation settles, and we get feature parity with 
what's currently supported in the 'nicl' branch, we will start the 
process of removing the 'nicl' branch. Well, almost: in Mercurial you 
can't really remove a branch, the branch will still be there for future 
references, but we don't plan to make any significant update to it once 
the work on the 'foreign' branch is completed (this means that the 
automatic syncing to jdk/jdk master will also be turned off for 'nicl').

Cheers
Maurizio

[1] - http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mcimadamore/panama/panama-binder-v3.html