DevRoom Proposal: Life in the trenches

[Andrew Haley]

Title:

Life in the trenches, or The Agony and The Ecstasy of Making a
Contribution to OpenJDK

Abstract:

We've been working on OpenJDK for a long time now and we've gained a
lot of experience working on the code itself and, perhaps more
importantly, working with the Java team inside Oracle.  This talk is
about our experiences trying make one of the largest ever external
contributions to OpenJDK, the AArch64 port.

I'll talk about how the OpenJDK contribution process works, and how it
doesn't work, and how important it is to gain the trust of people
inside Oracle's Java team.  I'll discuss the strange asymmetry of
being an external contributor to a project but not being able to know
all of what is going on.  I'll try my best to explain the baffling
role of Projects and JEPs.  I'll speculate about the future of OpenJDK
and how it must change as more people outside Oracle contribute
significant slabs of code, and how we must have more external patch
reviewers.

Finally, I'll open up the floor for discussion.  I'm sure we'll have a
lot to talk about.

Andrew.