Proposed OpenJDK IcedTea project: Needs group sponsorship

[Andrew John Hughes]

2009/3/4 David Herron <david at davidherron.com>:
> Sorry for my delay in seeing this.  I used to be subscribed to this list but
> (ahem) with my change in email addresses (cough cough) I missed getting
> resubscribed to porters-dev.
>
> Andrew, thank you for your proposal
> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/porters-dev/2009-February/000239.html
>
> I almost completely agree with the proposal.  However I'd asked Mark
> Reinhold pretty much this exact question some time ago and got an
> interesting 'NO' response.

That's interesting because he was involved in the discussion on IRC
that led to this proposal without raising any immediate concerns.

As I understood his response, the Porters Group
> is about porting OpenJDK to platforms it does not currently support.  The
> IcedTea project is almost entirely about changes related to making it run
> well on Linux, and Linux is a platform already supported by OpenJDK.  Hence
> IcedTea is not porting OpenJDK to Linux and technically it does not belong
> in the Porter's group.
>
> I think though the value of helping IcedTea more easily bring their patches
> upstream is greater than being picky about precise definitions of the scope
> of each group.
>

I understand that reasoning and had similar thoughts myself when the
porter's group was suggested. I think the main reason was that it's
one of the few groups that incorporates the whole project rather than
a subset such as HotSpot or the networking libraries, for example.
It's also one of even fewer groups (if not only?) which is new and
formed by the community, rather than being an external realisation of
an internal Sun product group.

That said, at this stage, based on my reading of the project rules on
the OpenJDK website (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/), we need
someone from any existing group to turn our proposal into a formal
proposal.  Dalibor agreed to do this as a member of the porters group.
 I don't believe this means the project has to end up being sponsored
by this group in the end, merely that we need a group to support the
proposal for formal recommendation.  I don't believe any members of
Red Hat are group members and I'm not even sure of the process by
which a group member or group is proposed, though I've seen new
members being added to some.  To be honest, I find a lot of this
process overly bureaucratic personally, and I agree with your last
point in that I'd prefer that simple semantics and administrative
processes didn't get in the way of contributions from the wider
community where possible.

Thanks again to Dalibor and the other members of this group for
considering this proposal and I hope it does reach the formal proposal
stage at the end of this week.

> - David Herron
>
>
>

Cheers,
-- 
Andrew :-)

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

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