Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Tuesday November 04, 2008

OpenJDK 6 Genealogy

To address some of the questions that have come up recently in comments and elsewhere, I've prepared a diagram of OpenJDK 6's genealogy:

The original JDK 6 code base begat two lines of heirs: JDK 7 and the sequence of 6 update releases. The decision to open source the JDK code base came late in the life cycle of the development of JDK 6 so a build of JDK 7 was the first be published as open source. By the time JDK 7 was published as OpenJDK 7, the first post-GA update to JDK 6, 6u1, had already shipped. Work continued in both the OpenJDK 7 and 6 update trains. However, an open source implementation of the Java SE 6 specification was needed as well. After considering the alternatives, OpenJDK 7 build 20 was chosen as the basis of a backward branch to create OpenJDK 6 by removing changes inappropriate for a Java SE 6 implementation. Since then, all three trains, 6 update, OpenJDK 7, and OpenJDK 6, have continued evolving, with certain fixes being ported between the releases.

At some point in the future, the OpenJDK 7 code base will in turn presumably give rise to OpenJDK 7 update releases and OpenJDK 8.