| 24 Sep 2024 |
 emily | my fear about shipping 8 indefinitely, when Debian and Ubuntu have already given up on it, is that it has 6 years of life left. newer versions will continue to diverge from it, requiring more build conditionals and complexity, and it may become increasingly painful to keep building with the modern compilers and libraries in Nixpkgs | 19:29:16 |
| emily | for instance, I've had to manually backport FFmpeg support patches to older versions of OpenJFX, which is quite a maintenance drag | 19:29:34 |
 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 |
