Andreas Schaefer's Blog

JDK Community: Dream or Reality

Yesterday Ray Gan blogged about the JDK Community listing some of the facts about the Peabody project. If you never heard about that project then you are not alone and I only now about it because Joshua Marinacci gave a presentation about it at the LA-JUG last year. But even without knowing about the Peabody project is became a JDK contributor last year in November and started to code a fix for bug #6212146 which I has sent to Sun for a review by the end of November. I got an initial confirmation that the bug fix was received but that was all I heard from Sun for a long time. Then January 2006 Ray blogged about the state of JDK Community and I responded complaining about that I got no feedback from Sun about my patch. A little bit later I finally got an email from Michael McMahon (1/31) that they started to look into the patch. I also spoke with Matt Ingenthron from Sun about it and he tried to find out what is going on and to bring some more transparency into the JDB Community. Needless to say that I did not get any feedback since then

As a good citizen I took the time yesterday to fill out the survey and to pour in some of my thoughts and complaints. Now I take the opportunity of this blog to share my thoughts on the JDK Community to a broader audience. As an active open-source developer I know both sides of the aisle, the one that runs a project and the one that provides patches. But in order to keep a community alive and active the project team must react to input from the community and give feedback without being pushed all the time. Especially in this case where Sun is a huge company and Java is a big project getting a community project up an running is difficult. Nevertheless as a contributor I think I have the right that Sun not only receives the work from the contributors but also gives something in return and the very basic would be feedback on the progress of a patch. Unfortunately a regular contributor cannot get the CTS in order to make sure that one's but fixes does not break Java and so I cannot test it thoroughly. This means a contributor has to wait until Sun provides feedback to improve the patch. As a contributor I do not want that my patch is swallowed by a black hole and one day it makes it into the JDK or not.

I suggested a few improvements and most prominently I would love to have a contract person within Sun with whom I can work on the patch to make it into the JDK. He/she does not have to be the developer that test or improve the patch but he/she must be able to answer questions and to provide feedback. I do not need contests, awards or public recognition but I would love to have my name as author in the Java code when the patch makes it into the JDK. In addition I would love to have forum(s) for contributors where they can discuss items with the Sun's Java developers and also a way to track which contributor is working on which bug so that I can avoid working on a bug that someone else is already working on. Maybe it would be a good idea to invite some contributors into an expert group to improve the JDK Community process.

Currently I am not working on any patches for the JDK because I want to ensure that my time spent on this is spent worthwhile and so I want to see if it makes it into the JDK or not and in case it fails I want to know why. That said I still hope that Sun can improve the JDK Community because I would love to work on the JDK in the future. So far I am disappointed about the process and also think that this is why there are not as many contributions as one would expect (see the JDK Community List).

-Andy

Comments

• Good sensible stuff Andy. Either Sun should be serious about this or not do it.

  It occurs to me whats needed is a way to submit online, a patch to be automatically tested against the the test suite. Doesn't have to be synchronous as long as you could get results via email.

  Posted by: colt_nz on March 08, 2006 at 04:10 PM

• when your talking about the need for a forum are you aware that there is a collaborator forum?:
  https://jdk-collaboration.dev.java.net/servlets/ForumMessageList?forumID=1463

  Ive worked with several different engineers over there on my submissions. Sometimes I do it by email as well.

  I had the fun experience where karsten noticed some odd behavior, Scott Violet put a bug report up for it and I subsequently put a patch together for it. Lets see I submitted that on Feb 12, was notifed that its scheduled for integration with b76 on March 2.

  It looks like your fix is scheduled for integration for b77, according to the tail comment on the bug.

  gotta run! leouser
  

  Posted by: leouser on March 08, 2006 at 07:02 PM

• Dream, unfortunately.

  cheers,
  dalibor topic

  Posted by: robilad on March 09, 2006 at 09:28 AM

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