There's been
some discussion in the last week on a PR against the Jakarta
EE TCK process guide[1] and on today's platform call[2] that
needs discussion on this list.
The background is that
last year there was a 'Requirements on standalone
TCKs'
specification
committee issue[3] that resulted in an update to the TCK
process guide[4]. I think I can fairly correctly
characterize the key motivation there as a (valid IMHO)
desire to ensure that as new 'standalone' TCKs are created
we don't lose the ability to test that EE component impls
work correctly in an actual EE environment.
We are coming up
on release deadlines for various component specs, but I
don't think the precise implications of the TCK process
change are understood (for example, see the discussion at
[5]). So my goal here is 1) to get more clarity, 2) to
increase awareness of these requirements and 3) to work
through any implications for completing the EE 11 release.
I'll frame all
this in terms of questions. Some I'm pretty sure I know the
answer, but maybe I'm wrong, or maybe others are less sure.
Note that I'm going to refer a fair bit to things discussed
in the links below, particularly the change included in [4].
1) What is a
'standalone TCK'?
This is a term
for an individual specification's TCK that can be executed
independent of the larger platform or profile TCK. This does
not just mean a TCK for a 'standalone specification', i.e. a
Jakarta spec like Jakarta MVC that is not part of any
platform or profile.
I like Emily
Jiang's use of 'individual specification TCK' in the [4]
change, as it avoids the ambiguous meaning of 'standalone'.
2) Is this
relevant to TCK service releases?
It's been
clearly agreed that this is only relevant for TCKs that are
producing updates for major or minor spec releases. Service
releases are unaffected; service releases are not allowed to
make these kinds of changes.