Currently the jdk makefiles say that findbugs and setting FINDBUGS_HOME is a build requirement. The original idea was that we could run findbugs as part of the build but that never happened and all indications are that this would extend the build times well beyond anything that people would tolerate. So the proposal is to strip this build dependency from the jdk Makefiles, since it was never used this is mostly a bookkeeping change.

Running findbugs is something that can be done after a jdk is built, and hopefully in the IDEs (like netbeans and eclipse) that people are using to code development (nobody uses vi or emacs anymore, do they? :^).

There are also some complications with running the findbugs startup script on Windows, a separate issue, but the reality is that findbugs really only needs to be run on one platform for the most part.