David Holmes - Sun Microsystems wrote: > Andrew John Hughes said the following on 06/20/08 09:35: >> I would hope one of the side effects of moving the JDK from a >> proprietary to a community-based Free Software model would be that it >> gets built, run and tested on a much wider range of platforms and >> compilers. This has already started to happen. > > Agreed - this is a good end goal. Meanwhile there are some > practicalities to address. > >> The reality is that people aren't going to download and build a >> specific copy of GCC just for OpenJDK, and distros will certainly want >> it to build with the GCC they use for everything else. > > But are the Distros expecting/assuming that everything will work fine > with their version of GCC?
Yes, of course, and if it doesn't then we'll either fix GCC or OpenJDK. > Who is expected to have done the testing? There are two levels of testing here: that of the core package as written, and that of a specific build, for which we need to do regression testing. There is nothing special about Java in this regard: every package has the same problem. The packagers of the distros have been doing this stuff for many years. > If something goes wrong who would be expected to fix it? Would the > Distros patch the OpenJDK code with a workaround for their GCC > version? Or would they grab a known working GCC version and rebuild > using that? We'll patch OpenJDK or GCC, depending on which is at fault. We will not build a special GCC in order to build OpenJDK; that would be a pain and contrary to packaging guidelines. > Right now the reality is that these alternate compiler versions have > not undergone extensive testing for the OpenJDK. I guess it all depends on what you mean by "extensive". We've run all the test suites to which we have access and a good deal of application testing too. > Over time that will hopefully change, but for now - caveat emptor! Of course. One of the problems here is that the distro packagers need access to regression tests, some of which (AIUI) are still Sun confidential. Andrew.
