OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2019/10/10
The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 10 October 2019 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:
- Skara progress (Joe Darcy)
- Any other business
Three Board members were present: Georges Saab, Doug Lea, and Mark Reinhold. Andrew Haley sent his regrets in advance.
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. Skara progress (Joe Darcy)
Georges introduced Joe Darcy of Oracle, the Lead for Project Skara. Joe presented a set of slides providing a quick update on Project Skara and Git. Highlights include the following:
- slide 3: The Bylaws do not mandate any particular infrastructure; however, they do require sensible access to stored artifacts.
- slide 5: The Skara mirrors on GitHub provide an opportunity for contributors in the OpenJDK Community to see what repositories would look like after a transition to Git. The mirrors are updated within a few minutes and are read-only (i.e. not accepting pull requests).
- slide 6: To improve integration with Git tooling, commit messages would be re-formatted.
- slides 8,9: Skara work to date is described in JEP 357 (Migrate from Mercurial to Git). A second JEP to determine a hosting provider is yet to be written.
- slide 10: A few OpenJDK Projects have moved development to GitHub with Skara, on an experimental basis.
After stepping through the slides, Doug congratulated the members of the Skara team on their progress so far. He indicated that he favored storing code on servers under maintenance by professionals. Joe said that he had reason to believe that the hosting choice may be problematic for some. Doug commented that if Mercurial operations were faster, the transition would not be necessary. Mark replied that the problem was with Oracle's network infrastructure, not Mercurial.
Doug noted that the presence of so many bots was a slight concern since they represented points of failure. Joe replied that the bots represent trade-offs. They automated existing manual processes (e.g. OCA Signatory List checking) for a better user experience; however, more automation requires more moving parts.
In closing, Georges complimented the Skara team's work, observing that when transitions of difficult and complex systems are successful, nobody notices. He looked forward to more updates as Skara progressed and encouraged members of the OpenJDK Community to try out the Skara mirrors.
At this point, the Board adjourned.
