On 02/18/2011 10:09 PM, Kelly O'Hair wrote:
But there have been some roadblocks for the open source community.
It has been observed (for a long time now) that:
* The Mercurial jcheck extension needs to be open sourced
* The bug tracking system needs to be completely open
* We need an open build and test system for the OpenJDK developers who don't
have access to all the systems
We are working on it. And of course you have heard that before, but we are,
really.
That's very good news, especially the bug tracking system. I thought
that the plans to open that up had been abandoned with the Oracle
acquisition of Sun.
It's that last item that involves myself and a group of Oracle engineers in
Stockholm, hopefully we
can come up with a solution that works for everybody. I have tentatively named
it BAT for
Build And Test, but it is just in the infancy stage, nothing official yet. But
we would like some input.
The intent would be to accept repository paths, tips, and changeset bundles or
diffs (for test runs),
run it through a matrix of builds and tests, and return back status or even do
the Push if requested.
Internally, we have such a system, but it's not clear exactly how much we can
reuse.
Due to the proprietary nature of some of the tests and systems, and also a need
for security, it's not
exactly clear how much data we can expose. But we should be able to run
selected and critical tests for
everyone, and of course verify there have been no build issues introduced by a
change.
Fabulous.
When all goes well, that is one thing, but when it doesn't and non-open tests
fail, then it gets tricky.
(yeah yeah we should open source the tests, that just can't happen in all
cases).
It'll be tricky if some crucial flaw is revealed by a private test. I
suppose in that case that an Oracle engineer will have to analyse the
problem.
It is clear to us that we cannot make the system entirely "open", but we can
provide a kind of portal
(I hate that word), or view (a better word) into what is happening. Exposing
what we legally can and
hopefully providing enough information to make the system work for everyone.
So what do you think? Any opinions out there?
This sounds like a big step forward, and a great way to show everyone
that Oracle is determined to work with the community.
Andrew.
