encumbrances update

[Kelly O'Hair]

Dan Fabulich wrote:
> Kelly O'Hair wrote:
> 
>> It was never expected that the initial OpenJDK source drops would be 
>> buildable on Windows.
> [...]
>> So that fact that it has never built on Windows was well known, I 
>> thought.
> 
> Actually, that comes as a (small) surprise to me.  When I asked about 
> Windows build problems at Mark's OpenJDK talk at JavaOne, I asked him if 
> he believed it should work; he said yes.  I then followed up with a 
> question like: "Would you believe that it doesn't work?" he again 
> replied yes.  I showed him the failure, to which I believe he replied: 
> "Bummer." :-)
> 

Many of us had hopes it would work in the end, I was hopeful til the end too.
Ted obviously figured out how to create a t2k.lib from a t2k.dll, so
he got pretty close...  Not that we expected anyone to try that hard. ;^)

> Certainly there's no sign on the website or in the README that Windows 
> is *expected* not to work; instead, what you find are build 
> instructions, with warnings that Windows is a difficult environment 
> requiring a gentle touch, etc.

I suspect that many of us at the lower levels were surprised that the
windows binary plugs were even made available.
But as to the README, I was responsible for that, and I was thinking more
'long term' when I kept the Windows information in it, some people didn't
want it there until we delivered windows buildable bundles. I was probably
wrong to include it, just confused things.

> 
> Especially in light of earlier e-mails from you back in June suggesting 
> that build 15 would probably work, I frankly believed all this time that 
> you guys just had no free Windows testing resources, and so nobody had 
> ever tried a realistic clean OpenJDK build on Windows using the same 
> plugs that we get.
> 

A fairly valid analysis. We had high hopes, but our delivery was poor.
You are getting pretty raw sources when it comes to windows right now.

>> While I was trying to make t2k.lib available in the binary plugs, 
>> another team was busy trying to remove it completely. So you can't say 
>> we haven't been trying to deal with this issue.
> 
> I would never have said that.  I sincerely appreciate all of the work 
> that you and other engineers at Sun have done on this, and look forward 
> to the glorious day when one of us can get this thing to build! :-)

I look forward to it too, but in the meantime I need to get going on the
Mercurial repositories.

---

We have openjdk builds, and product jdk builds, and part of our internal issue here
is that it isn't easy to make sure both are building, so I'll be looking at
how we can get some/many of the developers inside Sun using a make target that does
both builds, chained together so to speak. Stay tuned on this...

As always, it will take some time for all this to get better, and hopefully
it's more steps forward than backward.

-kto

> 
> -Dan