openjdk build pages

[Omair Majid]

* dalibor topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com> [2014-05-21 05:15]:
> Actually, I think that for 7u60 (and 7u80) we need to move in the other
> direction, and not publish separate source bundles from the source code
> that's already in the Project's Mercurial repositories.

I encourage you to think again. The source code system used by OpenJDK
(hg trees) is not straight-forward to work with for packagers, and needs
non-standard tools, like the trees extension, to fetch complete and
consistent things.

Source bundles are really easy to work with as a packager. You know you
got something consistent that works and don't have to mess around with
source code control systems checking out various repositories and tags
to find the 'right' source.

> Beside being potentially error prone,

I am not sure I understand. Surely you can write a script that grabs the
right tags from the right forests to create a tarball. I could do it, if
I knew exactly which forests and tags contain the right stuff (and could
upload it somewhere on openjdk.java.net). In fact, I have something
generic already written [1]. Feel free to use it.

> and update releases that we can't work on as part of OpenJDK (like
> 7u55),

I am not sure I follow. If you can commit the source to the repository
and tag it, why can't you create a source bundle for those tags?

> The added complexity provides little benefit, and the simplest way to remove
> the complexity is to remove the issue causing it, and educate users to use
> the source ... directly from the respective source repository.

I respectfully disagree with your solution. If not providing source
bundles causes confusion, wouldn't the right fix be to provide source
bundles?

As for benefit, just today I saw people asking on #openjdk about where
to get source bundles. And they complained that using source control to
get a release bundles is too hard (and shouldn't be necessary).

Also, if you think users have problems distinguishing 7u60 from 7u55,
can you imagine the problems they will have trying to find the
real/final tag for 7u55 in the repos? And how some tags do not exist in
some repos at some points in time? [2].

Thanks,
Omair

[1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/java-1.8.0-openjdk.git/tree/generate_source_tarball.sh
[2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk7u-dev/2014-April/008969.html
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