I unintentionally posted this before I verified everything, so once I have verified it all works, I'll updated this post. But this is what should work...

Most Interesting Builder in the World:

"I don't always build the jdk, but when I do, I prefer The New JDK8 Build Infrastructure. Stay built, my friends."

So the new Build Infrastructure changes have been integrated into the jdk8/build forest along side the older Makefiles (newer in makefiles/ and older ones in make/). The default is still the older makefiles.

Instructions can be found in the Build-Infra Project User Guide. The Build-Infra project's goal is to create the fastest build possible and correct many of the build issues we have been carrying around for years. I cannot take credit for much of this work, and wish to recognize the people who do so much work on this (and will probably still do more), see the New Build Infrastructure Changeset for a list of these talented and hard working JDK engineers. A big "THANK YOU" from me.

Of course, every OS and system is different, and the focus has been on Linux X64 to start, Ubuntu 11.10 X64 in particular. So there are at least a base set of system packages you need. On Ubuntu 11.10 X64, you should run the following after getting into a root permissions situation (e.g. have run "sudo bash"):

1. apt-get install aptitude
2. aptitude update
3. aptitude install mercurial openjdk-7-jdk rpm ssh expect tcsh csh ksh gawk g++ build-essential lesstif2-dev

Then get the jdk8/build sources:

1. hg clone http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/build jdk8-build
2. cd jdk8-build
3. sh ./get_source.sh

Then do your build:

1. cd common/makefiles
2. bash ../autoconf/configure
3. make

We still have lots to do, but this is a tremendous start.

-kto