I'm pleased to announce the OpenJDK bug database migration project has reached a significant milestone: the JDK has switched from the legacy Sun "bugtraq" system to a new internal JIRA instance as the system of record for our bug tracking. This completes the initial phase of the previously described plan of getting OpenJDK onto an externally visible and writable bug tracker. The identities contained in the current system include recognized OpenJDK contributors.

The bug migration effort to date has been sizable in multiple dimensions. There are around 140,000 distinct issues imported into the JDK project of the JIRA instance, nearly 165,000 if backport issues to track multiple-release information are included. Separately, the Code Tools OpenJDK project has its own JIRA project populated with several thousands existing bugs. Once the OpenJDK JIRA instance is externalized, approved OpenJDK projects will be able to request the creation of a JIRA project for issue tracking.

There are many differences in the schema used to model bugs between the legacy bug system and the schema for the new JIRA projects. We've favored simplifications to the existing system where possible and, after much discussion, we've settled on five main states for the OpenJDK JIRA projects:

• New
• Open
• In progress
• Resolved
• Closed

The Open and In-progress states can have a substate Understanding field set to track whether the issues has its "Cause Known" or "Fix understood". In the closed state, a Verification field can indicate whether a fix has been verified, unverified, or if the fix has failed.

At the moment, there will be very little externally visible difference between JIRA for OpenJDK and the legacy system it replaces. One difference is that bug numbers for newly filed issues in the JIRA JDK project will be 8000000 and above. If you are working with JDK Hg repositories, update any local copies of jcheck to the latest version which recognizes this expanded bug range. (The bug numbers of existing issues have been preserved on the import into JIRA). Relatively soon, we plan for the pages published on bugs.sun.com to be generated from information in JIRA rather than in the legacy system. When this occurs, there will be some differences in the page display and the terminology used will be revised to reflect JIRA usage, such as referring to the "component/subcomponent" of an issue rather than its "category". The exact timing of this transition will be announced when it is known.

We don't currently have a firm timeline for externalization of the JIRA system. Updates will be provided as they become available. However, that is unlikely to happen before JavaOne next week!