| 24 Sep 2024 |
 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 |
