On 03/13/2013 07:47 PM, Andrew Hughes wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- >> Oracle ended public updates of JDK6 at the end of last month. Many >> people seem to have concluded that the OpenJDK6 project will >> therefore >> end at the same time. This is incorrect: OpenJDK6 will continue, but >> will be maintained by the community outside Oracle. > > 1. Oracle had three main roles in relation to OpenJDK 6; acting as > gatekeeper over which patches were accepted into the repository, > providing security updates and making releases. The third of these > doesn't seem to be addressed above. Will new releases of OpenJDK 6 > be made? IcedTea for OpenJDK 6 uses release tarballs as a base so, > unless there are further releases, none of the changes made upstream > in OpenJDK 6 will be consumed by IcedTea downstream. I believe we > are already overdue a new release as there is no release of OpenJDK > 6 containing the last three sets of security updates.
Indeed, we need to make a new release of OpenJDK 6 with the security patches. There may be infrastructure issues here as we don't AFAIK have access to Oracle servers on which to place release tarballs. Or do we? > 2. What many people actually see as OpenJDK 6 at present, in the > form of their GNU/Linux distribution package, is actually IcedTea > for OpenJDK 6. Unlike 7, where the changes in IcedTea are just to > make it "distro-ready" (using system libraries, etc.), there are now > so many backports and other fixes local to IcedTea 6 that it is > effectively a different beast altogether. Will OpenJDK 6 be open to > accepting some of these fixes, many of which were added to the > proprietary version of JDK 6 maintained by Oracle a long time ago, > so the two can eventually be in sync? That would, in my view, be a huge waste of effort. It also risks breaking things for no net gain. > 3. The largest contributions to OpenJDK 6 from Red Hat have been > the merges of new versions of HotSpot, upgrading it from 11 through > 14, 16 and 19, to its current version of 20. Given appropriate > testing, is moving to a newer version of HotSpot a possibility? Yes. I believe that it is necessary to make some small changes to HotSpot to make it fully Java SE 6 compatible, but we should do this. > 4. Finally, this is just a thought, and I realise it may run > contrary to your promise of long-term stability and compatibility, > but I've been giving some thought to the long running issues we've > had with javac in OpenJDK 6. For those who are unaware, the javac > in OpenJDK 6 is not the same as in Oracle's proprietary JDK 6, but > rather an early development version of the one used in OpenJDK 7. > I've been wondering if the best way of supporting this long-term > would be to use the tools from 7 in OpenJDK 6, with appropriate > reversions to make it compatible with 6 (defaulting to 6 > source/target, having builds pass the 6 TCK), rather than continuing > to maintain the hybrid we have now. No. As explained by the Javac team, javac 7 does not accept precisely the same language, even in "Java 6" mode, and such a change would risk breaking builds all over the place. This is exactly the kind of change that I wish to prevent. > In closing, I'd like to welcome this new chapter in the life of > OpenJDK 6 and I hope it is successful in continuing existing > community involvement, and hopefully taking things even further. I hope so too. Andrew.
