On 05/02/2014 08:26 AM, Ivan Krylov wrote: > Suppose you are working on a
cross-platform bug or feature. You want to make sure that the fix works on Windows as well. I would think that testing the fix with cross-compiled build would be insufficient for the reasons that Volker lists. If the produced bits aren't the same (and they won't be the same) we can not trust the results of such testing.
Even with native tools, the builds do not match what others will end up with. I generally won't test with the patches downstream distributions use, especially those who have closed patches, and there are also quite significant differences in compiler versions and build environment. This isn't really specific to OpenJDK—you can often avoid such issues by not going all too crazy with boundary conditions etc.
Would building with mingw64 make things worse? Could be, but we don't really know at this point.
-- Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team
