JDK 7 Repository updates

[Volker Simonis]

Hi,

we have internally discussed the best way for syncing up with the
upstream jdk7u-dev repository forest. Actually there are two
possibilities:

1. "pull -u" and merge
pros: simple and fast
cons: one big merge changeset which may hide changes which have
previously been intentionally and carefully split into different
changes.

2. create a new forest (as clone of jdk7u-dev) and transplant our
changes from 7u into the new 7u-dev
pros: clean new repo with the chance to manually merge related
changesets from our current repository
cons: a little more time consuming than 1

We are very much in favour of alternative 2 because we would like to
combine some of our changes (especially from the HotSpot repository).
We initially already tried to bring in self contained, meanigful
changes but in reality they had often been followed by small bug fix
changes. With the new jdk7u-dev forest we would get the opportunity to
clean this up. This would also be an intermediate step towards the
ultimate goal to provide a set of clean, reviewable changes for jdk8.

We would like to start with this work within a week or two. Once we
had the new jdk7u-dev forest in our porting repository we would
sequentially bring over all changes from the current 7u forest. We
expect this process will not take more than about two weeks.
Afterwards, the 7u forest will be closed and all further work will be
done in the 7u-dev forest (i.e. nightly build and tests will use this
new forest). The plan is to synchronize this new forest more regularly
with the upstream 7u-dev repository.

This would give us a current jdk 7 version (i.e. something which
should be very close to the upcoming 7u14 release) and a good starting
point for the next step which would be the integration into jdk8.
Especially we don't expect that the HotSpot repository in 7u-dev will
need much attention in the future any more because it seems the the
currently integrated HotSpot Express 24 (hsx24) is the last new
HotSpot version which has been backported into the Java 7 releases.

Please let us know if you are comfortable with this approach.

Regards,
Volker