Mark Reinhold's Blog

Mustang Snapshots: Another experiment in openness

Way back when I was an undergrad I had a professor who was a stickler for experimental method. She was also, however, always anxious to see what you had learned. As soon as she understood your experimental setup -- which was usually before the end of your explanation of it -- she'd insistently ask, "What were your results?" Between her enthusiasm for the question and her eastern-European native tongue the last word would always come out as "RHEE-zults". That question, and her unique pronunciation, have stuck in my head ever since...

Last June we did a first "experiment in openness" with the Tiger Snapshots. We posted each weekly Tiger build, in binary form, from the Beta 2 release right up to the Release Candidate. The results were positive: About ten thousand brave souls downloaded the builds and filed several dozen bugs, and the most critical handful of those bugs was fixed in time for the RC build.

Inspired by the success of the Tiger snapshots, today we posted the first of the Mustang Snapshots. We've made some significant changes this time around:

• We've started earlier. You can get build twelve today. Yes, that's twelve as in 12. There aren't a whole lot of changes in this build, mainly just bug fixes and a few small enhancements here and there, but you'll see more change going forward as new features are integrated.

  As usual, snapshot builds are not for the timid. They receive only limited testing -- just a few hours' worth to make sure that they're warm and breathing. If you want stability then you'd best wait for the Mustang beta release, but if you enjoy living on the bleeding edge then these builds are for you.

• We're shipping source bundles. For the first time ever we're shipping source bundles for a J2SE release while it's under active development (gulp). This should make it easier for interested developers to contribute to the release as it evolves. In past releases the only ways to do that were to be lucky and know someone at Sun, or be lucky and have your suggestion survive the labyrinthine gauntlet of the bug-submission process.

  Posting source bundles will also make it easier for us to be embarrassed by our mistakes, but we're quite happy to be arbitrarily embarrassed in exchange for higher quality.

• We're using java.net. One of the big goals here is to engage better with the developer community, and java.net provides excellent infrastructure for that. The bundles are being hosted in the overall j2se project, which will shortly acquire the other usual project accoutrements such as mailing lists and forums. We're also working on a streamlined process for patch submission so that you can send code directly to real live JDK engineers rather than paste it into a bug report, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

• We're using a new license. The source bundles are covered by the Java Research License. The JRL is, to my non-lawyerly brain, a big improvement over the old SCSL license -- for one thing, I can understand it! The JRL also gives developers and researchers more flexibility than SCSL did, though it's still not an actual open source license in OSI terms (sorry).

Taken together these changes obviously entail a much bigger, and longer, experiment than the Tiger Snapshots. We certainly don't want to wait until the end to learn from the experience and make adjustments. If you have ideas on how we could do any of this better, please let us know!

Comments

• I think this is really great. I have a question, will changelogs be posted in future builds? It would be nice to be able to look at a snapshot, and see if it affects me by looking at a list of changes and/or affected/fixed bugs/RFE's.

  Posted by: keithkml on November 15, 2004 at 06:53 PM

• Great News - Thanks Mark! Keep up the great work.

  Posted by: rjlorimer on November 15, 2004 at 07:46 PM

• How can Sun start posting binaries of mustang when there is no mustang JSR? Does Sun just use the jcp when it needs to. We might as well shutdown the mustang forum as its obvious this is just a facade, Sun has its own agenda and we have been made fools
  

  Posted by: davenaylor on November 15, 2004 at 10:21 PM

• Excelent!!!!!

  How do I get java doc for this new jre?
  I tried to do source build but to many steps just for Javadoc.
  When I get the binary, there is no Javadoc.

  HELP. PLEASE.
  I am to excited.

  Anyway, I will post a sample appl
  .V

  Posted by: netsql on November 16, 2004 at 05:28 AM

• @davenaylor:
  How about RTF blog entry? I'll help you: "There aren't a whole lot of changes in this build, mainly just bug fixes and a few small enhancements".
  How do bug fixes need a JSR? And not every enhancment needs to be in a JSR. The development of the Java source code at Sun is going on and they are getting ready for and doing post-Tiger work that's all that's happening here; No need to start conspiracy theories.

  
  If you want a view of Mustang JSRs, look at these:
  http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=255
  http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=250
  are examples of what will probably be a part of Mustang (this is just me grepping the JSR overview page, I don't know if there are other as well).

  Posted by: murphee on November 16, 2004 at 06:20 AM

• @Mark Reinhold (and everyone involved):
  Thanks a lot, Sun! This is a step in the right direction, and will allow people to follow the development more closeley and to report bugs and problems earlier.

  Posted by: murphee on November 16, 2004 at 06:21 AM

• Some more openness from some of the JSRs scheduled for Mustang would be most welcome. Specifically, what is JSR-203 up to?

  Posted by: mthornton on November 16, 2004 at 06:31 AM

• Well done Sun! It

  Posted by: kents1 on November 16, 2004 at 07:37 AM

• Where i can found a changelog of the builds?

  Posted by: lordy on November 16, 2004 at 10:49 AM

• I've posted a summary of all the changes made in Mustang since Tiger FCS into
  the changes folder of the Documents &
  Files section of the j2se project.
  

  Posted by: mreinhold on November 16, 2004 at 02:54 PM

• Mark, is it possible to change bug sorting in sub-sections: sorty by priority rather than by bug number (wich is pretty useless).

  Thanks!

  Posted by: vsizikov on November 16, 2004 at 09:35 PM

• > How can Sun start posting binaries of mustang when there is no mustang JSR? Does Sun just use the jcp when it needs to. We might as well shutdown the mustang forum as its obvious this is just a facade, Sun has its own agenda and we have been made fools.

  No, why should that be? SUN branched off a stable release (1.5) and what is now in their repository forms the base of 1.6 - sounds simple and reasonable to me....

  PS change-logs would be wonderful :o)

  Posted by: biehl on November 17, 2004 at 12:17 AM

• I'd like to suggest using CVS.

  I'd like to see the source snapshot being put into the CVS of the j2se project. You'd probably have to write a sync-script to copy all the files and cvs add/remove/commit all the changes at each release, but thats just about all.

  Note that I don't think its usefull for Sun to start developing in this CVS, just that the source releases are more accessable if a public history is available.

  Posted by: zander on November 18, 2004 at 03:25 AM

• ChangeLog idea.
  Please consider using the bugs.sun.com hostname for the fixed bugs in the mustang-b[nn].html file instead of the password-protected developer.sun.com hostname.

  Thanx.

  Posted by: zander on November 18, 2004 at 03:27 AM

• Snapshots in CVS: That's a good idea, and we're looking into it. In
  the nearer term we're working on including diffs in each source bundle so that
  you can see what's changed since the last snapshot. These will probably be in
  the same HTML-based "webrev" format that we use internally to do code reviews,
  so you can easily skim the diffs in a web browser.

  bugs.sun.com instead of developer.sun.com: That's a no-brainer.
  We'll try to do that for next week's snapshot.

  BTW, I updated the first change log
  yesterday to include a bunch of changes that were accidentally omitted
  from the first version due to a bug in the SQL query used to generate the
  report.
  

  Posted by: mreinhold on November 18, 2004 at 09:28 PM

• This is a highly commendable effort. Frankly I am not in the "make Java Open Source" camp. So far I am very happy with the software, the core libraries and the extensions, except Java Rules JSR which appears to be premature and JFC which appears conceptually flawed.
  I hope they are not included as part of JDK.
  If Sun can make the development tools as good as they did with the JDK, I can assure you Sun will have a big business for a long time to come with Java alone. Unfortunately the current IDE's from Sun are slow and cumbersome.

  Posted by: angsuman on November 24, 2004 at 02:22 AM

• We are showing live code examples on the Zamples site. The general public is welcome to add new code examples to the page. Let me know of any comments you might have.

  -- Mike Slinn

  Posted by: mslinn on November 26, 2004 at 10:55 AM

• We are showing live code examples for Merlin on the Zamples site. The general public is welcome to add new code examples to the page. Let me know of any comments you might have.

  -- Mike Slinn

  Posted by: mslinn on November 26, 2004 at 10:55 AM

• OT: Can you help w/ this?
  http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=315
  tia,
  .V

  Posted by: netsql on January 03, 2005 at 01:49 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.