Proposed OpenJDK IcedTea project: Needs group sponsorship

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/2/20 Andrew John Hughes <gnu_andrew at member.fsf.org>:
> Hi everyone,
>
> As many of you are aware, the IcedTea project:
>
> http://icedtea.classpath.org/
>
> has done a lot of work over the past year and a half in making OpenJDK
> available on a wide range of distributions and architectures.  At
> present, the build process for IcedTea involves the application of
> several patches (over 100 looking at a recent checkout), and it would
> clearly be better to see most of these reach the upstream project
> where possible.  The best way to do this seems to be to collect those
> changes from SCA signatories in a upstream tree, which would then
> provide an easy means of tracking which patches are headed upstream.
> I'd expect each changeset unique to the IcedTea forest to have an
> associated bug on bugs.openjdk.net too.
>
> This has the following advantages:
>
> * The process for getting patches into OpenJDK7 build drops already
> involves passing from one forest to another.  Putting IcedTea into
> this equation should make things easier for all concerned.
> * There is a clear distinction between patches for IcedTea which can
> be used by OpenJDK and those which still have legal issues.  The
> latter remain in IcedTea's current repositories and are applied to the
> IcedTea forest base.
> * The work on IcedTea becomes more immediately visible to developers
> working with the hg.openjdk.net repositories.
> * The merge work required for IcedTea7 goes down a lot, being done
> once in the forest rather than locally on every machine for numerous
> permutations of configure options...
> * The process of moving from patches in IcedTea to the IcedTea forest
> can be more immediate than just submitting bugs, and also acting as a
> cleanup process for these patches.
>
> I hope that the Porters group can see the value of this proposal and
> would be willing to sponsor it in order to make this an official
> OpenJDK project.  According to http://openjdk.java.net/projects/ a
> member of a group needs to formally propose the project on
> announce at openjdk.java.net and my hope is that a member of this group
> would be willing to do so and in so doing support the work of the
> IcedTea developers and, in turn, Red Hat's contribution to the OpenJDK
> project.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Andrew :-)
>
> Free Java Software Engineer
> Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)
>
> Support Free Java!
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In addition I should note that the intention is for this to be an
OpenJDK7 forest (like most of the others) with the downstream being
IcedTea7.  However, I would hope that Joe Darcy and others working on
OpenJDK6 can also use this as an easier source for patches for the 6
repository (given they are already in Mercurial and are known to be
from SCA signatories).
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
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