JDK Updates Project Page (original) (raw)

Mario Torre neugens at redhat.com
Wed Nov 15 12:02:13 UTC 2017

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 7:47 PM, Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew at redhat.com> wrote:

My worry with moving away from the mailing list approach is it decreases the transparency even more. Now only those monitoring the bug will see what's going on. It's also worth noting that not everyone who posts to the update mailing lists has access to the OpenJDK bug database. I've filed bugs and pushed fixes on behalf of others before.

I actually suggested that to have an all in one place discussion, but Rob mentioned what you say too, that only people with bug database access would be able to participate in the discussion, which is obviously a no-go, the discussion needs to stay open, hence on the mailing list.

I think the rules as they stand are pretty ok, for LTS we will need different rules but limiting critical bugs to the short term updates makes sense. We only need to ensure that we can rise bugs to P1 for platforms that are not Oracle main interest, like AArch64 or PPC as you mention or for issues that are not marked as critical by Oracle but are for a given 3rd party. With the short term release, though, keeping a number of patches in downstream builds may be practical to sustain - considering that we are talking about back ports, those fixes will be in upstream repositories already.

I wonder if it isn't best to have this conversation again after the 9 and perhaps 10 versions will be EOL to see what is getting accumulated in downstream builds and see if we need a process change to limit the differences. Other than that, I don't see much of a problem, releases are only 6 months away each other, if for some reason 9 is EOLed by Oracle but, just as an example, Red Hat or SAP wants to keep maintaining it, this is the same process as we already do now for 6, 7 and eventually 8, at the take over patches can be merged into the main repository and back ported as newer versions go on for as long as this is needed.

Again, the weak link where I expect that to actually happen is the LTS, but this will need a separate set of rules, as we all seem to agree anyway.

All that said, you are clearly the most authoritative person regarding back ports issues, if you think something should be changed to facilitate the work with short term releases I think your feedback is really important to have.

Cheers, Mario

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