Governing Board Minutes: 2013/8/15

The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 16:00 UTC with the following agenda:

  1. Infrastructure Update
  2. Any other business

Four Board members were present: Georges Saab, Andrew Haley, Doug Lea, and Mark Reinhold.

No observers were present.

The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the Board’s discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested only in the latter then search for the word “AGREED” throughout the text.

1. Infrastructure Update

Mark reported that the open bug system has passed its Oracle-internal approvals and now undergoing final testing. He expressed confidence that the system would be available by JavaOne. Currently the team is working on getting usernames aligned and taking down the old Bugzilla system, bugs.openjdk.java.net. That domain will be re-used for the new system. Andrew asked about access rights for issue creation. Mark explained that full access would be granted to anybody in the OpenJDK Community who is a Committer or above. Georges said that anybody in the world can look at bugs in the new system and submit bugs at bugs.sun.com, as they’ve always done. Andrew asked who would handle bug triage. Mark said that there have been expressions of interest, notably from the London JUG, and that enabling that would be investigated. Georges thought that the new system will allow people who are active in the community to be active in the bug system. Andrew expected that the London JUG would be very good at triage and that such an activity would be a good way to get more people involved in OpenJDK. Mark believed that it’s possible to establish labels for “low-hanging fruit” bugs that are straight-forward to newcomers to work on. Doug was delighted with the thought that a new bug system would be available within two months. He recommended that the announcement of the demise of the old Bugzilla system be made soon.

Mark reported that the OpenJDK wiki is being used. There don’t appear to be any problems. He anticipated that the Mercurial server would be upgraded sometime after JavaOne.

Georges reminded the Board about the 2012 Scorecard and their earlier decision to adopt it as the annual report. He asked whether the Scorecard survey should be sent out again. Andrew thought it was a good idea, noting that the usual challenge would be to encourage participation as appropriate. Mark suggested that the survey not be sent out until the first week of September, to avoid people’s summer vacations. Georges agreed that the survey should be sent out after most people are returning from vacations and thinking about going to JavaOne.

2. Any other business

Andrew wanted to register a concern related incoming ports. He heard that the PPC/AIX Port Project wanted to contribute their port to OpenJDK but understood that it would take “a couple of years”. Andrew inquired how long one could expect to get a port in. Georges thought that it would depend on the port. As Oracle has invested in adding ports, they’d noticed that there are places where the code is not structured to bring ports in easily. He didn’t expect an incoming port to take “years”, but “weeks” was also not accurate. Georges also said that in addition to the technical work, thought must also be given to when it would appropriate to inject the work in terms of a release. For example, it would not be advisable to push significant changes in the week before a release. He believed that the ideal time might be at the beginning of a new feature release. Mark recommended that Andrew review the PPC/AIX Port Integration Plan.

Mark noted that he intends eventually to begin a discussion on creating a policy for ports. He had a draft of such a policy, which was roughly how gcc works. The basic idea is that every port needs to have an owner. If a port goes unmaintained for a certain amount of time, say six months, then it may be removed. Andrew said that he would be in favor as such as policy since he does not want to maintain every port indefinitely.

At this point the Board adjourned.