JEP proposal: "PowerPC/AIX Port"

[Steve Poole]

On 15 Jan 2013, at 20:32, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> wrote:

> On 15/01/2013 16:56, Volker Simonis wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> before officially submitting this JEP proposal I want to post it here
>> for discussion.
>> 
>> Please notice that the focus of this JEP is not the porting effort
>> itself which has been mostly completed [1] but rather the integration
>> of the ports into the JDK8 main repository.
>> 
>> As always, any further comments, suggestions or questions are
>> highly welcome.
>> 
>> Thank you and best regards,
>> Volker
>> 
>> [1]: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/ppc-aix-port
> I think this needs a "Risks and Assumptions" and "Dependencies" sections to clearly list the assumptions and dependencies (some of these are in the current description).
> 
> In the "Motivation" section it includes the statement "Refactor and modularize the OpenJDK source base to simplify future ports" but that seems a bit different to the goal of integrating the port.
> 
> As I read the JEP then I don't see any high-level proposal as to how this might go in. You might remember the phased approach that was taken with the Mac port.

How would you propose we describe the merge activity in the JEP?   I'd imagine that the porters group members have an idea of 'best practise'  even if it's not documented.  I'd rather this JEP wasn't  conflated with defining that process but rather just pointed to it.

> 
> The testing section does not make it clear if the current OpenJDK tests will be updated to work on these new platforms.
> 
> Not JEP related but is there is jdk8 based forest with the proposed changes that someone could browse? It doesn't appear that ppc-aix-port/jdk8 is used. I did find ppc-aix-port/jdk7u but it doesn't appear to have been sync'ed up with jdk7u since 7u6 (I see there is a lot of recent activity on the hotspot repo, very little on the jdk repo for a few months).
> 
> Also not JEP related but what timeframe are you hoping to get this into the main line if funded? The start date in the JEP is proposed as 2013/Q2 and jdk8 will be well past Developer Preview at that point.
> 
> -Alan.
>