[Checkers] Tomorrow Release?

[Matt Papi]

> I am thinking of making a release tomorrow for the compiler and the
> checker framework.  This is an experimentation for me (and hopefully
> later on Mike) to make the release independent from Matt.

Sure, but depending on when you do it tomorrow, I may not be able to
help out if anything goes wrong. On the other hand, you probably
shouldn't need any help.

Also, there's one thing that has become out of date in the release
instructions: when doing a stable release after a dev release or vice
versa, you need to comment/uncomment the dev release section in the
HTML of the JSR 308 web page; I never finished updating the script to
do this automatically. I don't think it should affect you this time
around, since the last release was also a stable release. In any case,
I'll update the release instructions as soon as I can.

> I have updated the compiler today to use the latest build of javac and
> created a local mercurial repository for langtools.

That's great! Just out of curiosity, did you use 'hg convert' [1] to
also move the history from what's currently in SVN? If not, it should
be fairly easy to do that and apply your patch on top of that.

> - Where should the mercurial repository for the compiler be?

I think it would be safe to put it in $PAG/projects/annotations
(alongside a bunch of SVN dirs) so that you'd do "hg pull
$PAG/projects/annotations/langtools" making it "compatible" with the
current layout. Maybe having a specific subdirectory for Mercurial
repositories ($PAG/projects/annotations/hg/langtools) would be better.
If putting it alongside a bunch of SVN dirs doesn't work, maybe
$PAG/projects/jsr308/langtools would be a good choice.

Of course, given the nature of Mercurial, it would be just as good to
put it in some pag-writable subdirectory of ~mali until we decide the
best place for it (or until it gets put on hg.openjdk.java.net, if
that's supposed to happen soon). Then, when we move it to a more
permanent place, we can just point Mercurial at the new location.

> - Should we convert the checkers framework repository to mercurial too?

I like the idea mostly because I happen to find Mercurial much nicer
to work with than SVN or CVS (though of course I'll only be working on
it for ~2 more weeks :( ). It would also give us the opportunity to
come up with a cleaner layout (e.g., annotation file utils, checkers,
papers, and other random stuff are all in the same repository and
probably shouldn't be). It would also be really easy to switch via 'hg
convert'. On the other hand, it would require everyone who doesn't
already know it to learn it (though it's not _that_ hard, and many
will have to for langtools anyway), and tool support for hg (Eclipse
plugin, etc.) isn't quite as good as tool support for SVN yet.

 - Matt

[1] http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ConvertExtension