| 24 Sep 2024 |
 Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | That's the kind of situation where we keep JDK 8 but stop supporting it for stuff like that | 19:29:56 |
 emily | (not directly OpenJDK admittedly, but it gives an example of the churn caused by packaging many old versions of things) | 19:29:56 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | JDK 8 itself is still important just because so, so much still relies on it
But we don't necessarily need to actively back port stuff if it isn't necessary for other packages | 19:30:32 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Java 8 truly is the version that will not die | 19:31:02 |
| emily | well, if I hadn't spent the effort to backport FFmpeg support there then we would be keeping old FFmpegs in the tree even longer, which would be a drag on FFmpeg maintenance. carrying ancient software tends to act as a drag on the rest of the ecosystem in that way, where carrying one thing causes indefinite amounts of additional maintenance effort on other people throughout the tree. but fair enough, I get that Java 8 is particularly widely used and likely deserves some special status there (although I wonder what Debian/Ubuntu users are doing?) – but 11 and 17 aren't nearly so ubiquitous, right? | 19:32:18 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Yeah | 19:32:54 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | rging in Nixpkgs, there is actually less usage than I expected, though it's hard to tell what usage is like out-of-tree | 19:33:50 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | (Part of me wants to lib.warn "Hi! Please respond to this poll if you are still using JDK 8") | 19:34:11 |
| emily | that would break CI unless you removed all the in-tree users sadly :) | 19:36:21 |
| emily | you have to do some hacks to warn on a package without breaking the channels | 19:36:27 |
| emily | anyway, sorry to come in here like "hi, I don't know anything, can we get rid of all this stuff" 😅 it's just quite painful to remove or package a new JDK right now, and it really doesn't seem like we should need more than ~3 distributions | 19:37:29 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | No worries!
We definitely have room to trim down, like with Zulu as mentioned, that could definitely be replaced with Temurin if I'm reading things correctly. | 19:38:21 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | I don't think we should simply remove for the sake of removing, where possible, but when it's actively a maintenance burden it's worth it. | 19:38:55 |
| emily | sadly every package causes some kind of burden – if only by slowing down Hydra evaluation and build times and causing the channels to bump slower for everyone. but in this case it's a security burden too, since 22 is now EOL and someone has to go in and deal with every single copy of it and bump to 23 | 19:40:32 |
| emily | it seems like the main difference between Zulu and Temurin is that the former bundles OpenJFX. I don't know if it's possible for us to use our source OpenJFX build with Temurin or not? | 19:40:55 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Hmm, that would be a problem | 19:41:30 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | OpenJFX is bundled in at compile time iirc | 19:41:38 |
| emily | ah, so we ship Zulu for macOS because it's the only option to get JavaFX there, I suppose | 19:43:33 |
| emily | I was told that nobody actually really cares much about JavaFX recently :) but maybe it would make more sense to standardize on Zulu instead of Temurin, then? | 19:43:56 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Temurin is pretty much the standard binary release of OpenJDK, so I don't think we'll switch over | 19:47:10 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | (It's descended from the original AdoptOpenJDK, for reference) | 19:47:23 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Plus not everything needs OpenJFX | 19:47:34 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Ideally, we'd do a source build of JDK and JFX for Darwin, but that takes effort lol | 19:47:55 |
| emily | are there that many obstacles to a Darwin source build? | 19:48:52 |
| emily | OpenJDK doesn't have that many dependencies, does it? | 19:48:57 |
| emily | (I don't think there's too much reason to prefer one TCK-certified OpenJDK build over another if one meets our needs better though, since it's all the same stuff – but sticking with Temurin and leaving OpenJFX to source builds sounds reasonable to me) | 19:49:42 |
| emily | FWIW I use Darwin so I might be able to unblock source JDK, though I don't really want to spend too much time on it as I've only really ended up touching Java stuff because of my FFmpeg work or like now for security reasons :) | 19:52:43 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | My only connection to JDK has been Minecraft lmao
I just decided "Nobody else is doing this and I nerdsniped myself so this is my moment" | 20:21:25 |
| 25 Sep 2024 |
| emily | btw, it looks like the JDK 8 distributions will be ending support in ~2 years with the expected OpenJDK EOL | 03:20:11 |
| emily | the 6 years I was looking at was for Oracle builds | 03:20:23 |
