Workshop topic: Timing of update project handovers

[Volker Simonis]

Excellent topic! And there are plenty of other related questions. E.g.

The handover between Oracle being the project lead and a potential
future project lead is targeted to happen AFTER the final Oracle-led
JDK <XX> Update release has been published (see [1] for the "OpenJDK
10 updates announcement"). The problem with this approach is that the
"final update" is being cloned from jdk-updates/jdkXXu about 12 weeks
BEFORE the "final update" gets integrated (e.g. the RDP2 and cutoff
date for 11.0.2 was at October 28th but the release of 11.0.2 and its
integration into jdk-updates/jdk11u will be mid January 2019 only).

In this 12 weeks time frame, Oracle still serves as "gate-keeper" for
jdkXXu although it will not be responsible for the release which the
accumulated changes will be part of (e.g. Oracle said that "fixes
pushed after the cutoff date (for 11.0.2) will be targeted to 11.0.3"
[2]). This is kind of weird, because it means that after the
cutoff-date of the second security update, which usually happens
already about 4-6 weeks after the first GA release of the respective
major Java version, Oracle will still keep the responsibility for that
update project, although in fact all the changes collected there are
intended for the next, third update, for which Oracle won't be
responsible any more.

I therefor think it would be reasonable, if the hand-over between
Oracle and a potential future project lead will happen right after the
cutoff date of the second security release (for jdk11u this would have
meant end of October 2018). Of course the discussion for such a
transition would have to start at least some weeks earlier (in
practice this would probably be right after the first GA release of
the corresponding LTS version). Notice, that Oracle could still commit
the security fixes of its "final update" like any other "external"
committer, even if another party runs the corresponding updates
project by then.

Regards,
Volker

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-May/000128.html
[2] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-October/000263.html
On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 3:17 PM Martijn Verburg
<martijnverburg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Workshop topic: Timing of update project handovers
>
> Now that the leadership of update projects can occur every 6 months (3
> years for LTS's) there is a lot more external scrutiny (about the perceived
> stability) and decision making (including how many resources to commit to
> OpenJDK) that the ecosystem makes.
>
> One of the strong pieces of feedback that we've seen is that folks would
> like to understand which organization(s) are taking over an update project
> *before* the actual handover date.  Would be great to have this discussed.
>
> Sample Qs:
>
> Q: Would it be possible to name the next update leader in advance?
> Q: If so, how early in advance could that be?
>
> Cheers,
> Martijn