On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 09:24, Andrew John Hughes <gnu_and...@member.fsf.org > wrote:
> 2009/6/30 Martin Buchholz <marti...@google.com>: > > > (There is the deeper governance issue of who gets to make > > such decisions. I would like most of such decisions to be made > > by the "group" of engineers who do the work. For > collections/concurrency, > > such a group has worked informally for many years.) > > > > OpenJDK is (or at least should now be) a community-driven open source > project. And so, the community as a whole should be making such > decisions, not just those who happen to be employed by Sun. > Right. There is a problem when different sets of contributors have different objectives for things like compatibility, portability, stability, benchmark performance.... It might be that a significant contributor (like Sun or IcedTea) would maintain a separate set of patches essentially forever, since they would not be acceptable to the greater community. Oh, I guess that's already happened, eh? There's also the issue of the size of the project. Is OpenJDK a "project", or is it an aggregator of projects maintained by various third parties, like a Linux distro? Given how the code base has grown, at least a large number of components should be treated in the latter way. It is already the case, I believe, that the JAX* code is essentially imported unchanged from upstream maintainers. Martin
