The OpenJDK team is getting close to its goal of moving the source code of open source Java to GitHub. The plan is to move the repos from Mercurial to GitHub by early September.

OpenJDK is a long-running project that produces open-source reference implementations of the Java SE platform, with a new feature release every six months.

There is already a JDK repo on GitHub, but it's a read-only mirror. Under the plans from Project Sara, the GitHub repo will become the read-write master for JDK. 

The aim of Project Skara is to improve conditions for current contributors to OpenJDK and to make contributing more appealing to developers who don't currently contribute. Alongside the move to GitHub, Skara includes several server-side tools designed to help contributors during code reviews.

The OpenJDK committee says that using an external Git source code hosting provider comes with several benefits, including:

• Performance
• Community
• API

They say GitHub means the OpenJDK community can tap into large, existing, communities of developers and potential contributors. Hosting on Git would also gain access to web APIs that enable programs to interact with developers on the platform. The OpenJDK team says that although it obviously isn't impossible interact with developers using email, it is considerably harder to implement programs that interpret free-form text in emails compared to using a structured API.

Moving to Git should also reduce the size of the JDK repositories. The version control metadate in the prototype repositories that have been converted are significantly smaller - around a quarter of their current size on Mercurial. For example, the .git directory of the jdk/jdk repository is approximately 300 MB with Git and the .hg directory is around 1.2 GB with Mercurial,

 

More Information

OpenJDK Homepage

Project Skare Wiki

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