 | NixOS JVM | 122 Members |
| 27 Servers |
| NixOS JVM | 122 Members |
| 27 Servers |
| Sender | Message | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Jul 2025 | ||
 msgilligan | It seems like the core Nix Java team (however that is defined) should focus an a few JDKs as "first-tier" and a few more as "second-tier" and declare the rest as community supported. And this should be documented somewhere. Something like: First-tier:
Second-tier:
Community-supported: | 16:23:49 |
| msgilligan | It would be nice to see an OpenJDK build that works on Darwin and I believe there is an active PR to do this. If it can be done correctly, then Zulu could be "demoted" to community-supported. | 16:31:46 |
| msgilligan | I'm also wondering why Nix doesn't do what GUIX does and build OpenJDK n with OpenJDK n-1. I'm guessing this is because we don't have the bootstrap chain going back far enough to make this work? | 16:33:32 |
| msgilligan | * It seems like the core Nix Java team (however that is defined) should focus an a few JDKs as "first-tier" and a few more as "second-tier" and declare the rest as community supported. And this should be documented somewhere. Something like: First-tier:
Second-tier:
Community-supported:
| 16:34:13 |
 Alyssa Ross | Historically people have been resistant to long bootstraps in Nixpkgs because of the build times. (IMO we should do it anyway) | 16:34:20 |
| Alyssa Ross | Guix has bootstrappability as an explicit principle and we sadly dont | 16:34:40 |
 Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Having been the one to remove most of the JDKs, the problem with bootstrapping is maintaining all of the components | 16:35:11 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Most of the JDK steps were very unable to build I tried fixing them and at a certain point I just gave up | 16:35:46 |
| msgilligan | Yeah, not only does the whole chain need to be there, but it needs to be maintained. | 16:35:58 |
| Alyssa Ross | The flipside is it would be a lot easier to notice things that would break the old versions if they were in the critical path of the current version | 16:36:32 |
| msgilligan | I would really like to see full bootstrappability, but I guess that's not feasible in the short-run. | 16:36:59 |
| Alyssa Ross | So it wouldn't be as bad as maintaining old leaf versions | 16:37:03 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Considering how difficult it is to actively maintain OpenJDK already without the bootstrap chain, I am very skeptical of the benefit | 16:37:36 |
| msgilligan | It seems like creating tools to make the current maintenance easier is probably one of the biggest return-on-investment strategies. The JDK Dashboard tool, auto-updaters, more and better passthru tests, for example. | 16:40:42 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Yeah | 16:41:00 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Also if Nixpkgs has some mechanism to give security warnings only if something isn't a dependency | 16:41:35 |
 emily | I think Graal is currently unmaintained in Nixpkgs FWIW | 16:42:14 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | Because a bootstrap chain can't break evaluation for an EOL JDK version, but also should warn | 16:42:24 |
| Infinidoge 🏳️⚧️ | * Because a bootstrap chain can't break evaluation for an EOL JDK version, but also should warn if it is tried to be used | 16:42:28 |
| emily | I would suggest focusing on OpenJDK and Temurin binaries for now and expanding if it turns out there's resources to spare. in particular, I believe Zulu on Darwin can go away | 16:42:58 |
| emily | we use Zulu because we don't have a source build for OpenJDK/OpenJFX on Darwin. that should be easy to fix, but even ignoring that, the value-adds of Zulu over Temurin binaries are:
| 16:44:43 |
| emily | I think
| 16:45:24 |
| emily | * I think
would be sensible | 16:45:27 |
| Alyssa Ross | In reply to @infinidoge:inx.moeWe have done overrides for this before. It's fine. | 16:45:36 |
| emily | (I planned to do this, I just ran out of steam) | 16:45:43 |
| emily | (we also don't need OpenJFX to be part of the OpenJDK bootstrap, it can just be used as a separate package rather than integrated into the OpenJDK build these days I think, I believe all of that logic is ~pointless) | 16:46:13 |
| emily | ah, sorry, I see the Darwin source build was raised. I didn't know there was a PR | 16:46:49 |
| emily | I don't think we need a "demotion to community-supported" status because there is no second-tier community to support it… the Zulu packages just accumulate CVEs even faster than the other ones, it's pretty droppable | 16:47:39 |
| msgilligan | So, my personal priorities ("itches I need to scratch" for other projects I'm working on) are:
And I also want to learn more about Nix and help the community in general, so that's why I want to make:
It's also relatively easy for a newcomer like me to help with updates on some of the binary distributions. And anything I can do to get any JDK 24 or JDK 24 on | 16:49:22 |
| msgilligan | * So, my personal priorities ("itches I need to scratch" for other projects I'm working on) are:
And I also want to learn more about Nix and help the community in general, so that's why I want to make:
It's also relatively easy for a newcomer like me to help with updates on some of the binary distributions. And anything I can do to get any JDK 24 or JDK 25 on | 16:50:08 |