Re: [jdt-dev] About Y-Builds (was Re: 4.35 Y-Build: Y20250111-1000 - BUI

[Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 10:00 PM Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

* ask people who do work in BETA branches, how easy it would be to ensure that
every little change that is currently done in the branch can be safely protected
by a "feature switch" without making their lives much harder. As a preparation
you could have a look at some of the JLS diffs which specify the changes to be
made. Here's a good example:
https://cr.openjdk.org/~iris/se/24/spec/draft/java-se-24-draft-spec-31/specs/primitive-types-in-patterns-instanceof-switch-jls.html

Gathering feedback from experienced ECJ developer was actually the initial intent of this thread.

So I'm asking: could feature switches work for ECJ ? What would seem the harder (excluding the cost of the change itself) for ECJ developers: the rebase/merge process with branches or using feature switches?

As for less core contributors (ECJ testers, JDT Manipulation, JDT UI...), I'm quite certain that just having feature switches will make working towards newer Java much more efficient, as this would becomes just flags to activate rather than dealing with patch features, which is often causing trouble.