I build infrequently, but when I do, I often get errors due to out-of-date jaxp
and jax-ws source bundles. My typical process is something like this:
1) Start to build
2) Observe a failure complaining about an improper $ALT_DROPS_DIR
3) Track down my note where I wrote down the URL where I can get to a Web view
of /java/devtools/...
4) Navigate to the right folder and look for file timestamps that are more
recent than the last time I did this
5) Download & save the appropriate files to my source drops dir
6) Try again
I think this is more or less the "best practice," but correct me if I'm wrong.
In particular, I'm not relying on mounted access to the /java filesystem, as I
think most veteran Sun employees do, and I'm not using ALLOW_DOWNLOADS, which
is discouraged in the build documentation.
Short of getting rid of the source drops entirely, it seems like there's a lot
that could be done to streamline this process.
- It would be nice if the sanity check caught the missing files, rather than
waiting to complain in the middle of the build. (Fortunately, at least these
get built early.)
- The error message would be a lot more useful if it told me the name(s) of the
missing file(s) (which includes the version number) rather than assuming that
my ALT_DROPS_DIR setting is wrong.
- Even better, the error message could spit out the URL(s) where I could
download the file(s)! (This should be the same URL as used by ALLOW_DOWNLOADS.)
- The docs ("Creation of New Source Drop Bundles") say the OpenJDK team puts
new bundles in "/java/devtools/...", which is difficult to access. (Can
non-Oracle folks get to it? I rely on the javaweb internal server, which
happened to be down today...) Is/could this directory be made available
somewhere public, too?
Thanks,
Dan
