On Mon, 16 May 2022 at 23:18, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 9:54 PM Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 19:36 Tue 10 May     , Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Vitaly Zaitsev via devel:
> >
> > > On 10/05/2022 15:29, Ben Cotton wrote:

> Also, my sympathy for this argument is a little short, given the
> number of times we've released OpenJDK updates for Fedora on unembargo
> date, only for them to sit waiting for karma.  Recently, we even had
> one security update usurped by a later regression fix because it still
> hadn't gone stable in over a week. Let's not pretend that Fedora has
> every security issue fixed as soon as the unembargo lifts.
>

I don't know if you're going to gain any sympathy for stating this,
considering how badly the Fedora Java ecosystem has fallen apart in
the span of five years. Both in the wider Red Hat world and within
Fedora itself, Java has received less and less love, to the point that
it has been brutally starved. It has gotten so bad that Debian (!!!)
beat us to newer Java and we had to *beg* for this to be fixed. So
much for Features and First, eh?

Once, long ago, we were the leader in the Linux Java ecosystem, but
ironically as Red Hat's influence in OpenJDK grew, investment in
Fedora dwindled.

I am pretty sure that was a very very tiny period of time of 2 to 3 years. Over the 25 years I have worked on RHL and then Fedora.. we have nearly always been a far follower on Java. For a good period of time from 2004->2012, there were regular flaming mailing threads about "Java in Fedora sucks", "Java only wants exceptions to standard policies", "Fedora's java is broken on X". It took a LOT of work to get Java into a 'working state' but it is like 'welding' plastic to steel.. You constantly find yourself remelting parts or adding more glue until what you have is more 'stuff which keeps them stuck together' versus 'tools which work'. 

The investment when it was done back then was done by volunteers (they might have been @redhat.com but they weren't doing it as their main tasks) who frankly one after another burned out over the toxic reaction they got. [That said it was a two way street of toxic reactions...] For the last 7 years, there has been a dwindling number of people who basically got mostly 'this is bull$hit, fix it the way I want it' reactions from Fedora community members. For some reason, various people in the community have assumed that Red Hat pays people to work on Fedora primarily and Java secondary which was never the case. 


So tell me, if we actually *did* this, what are *you* planning to do
to make open source Java more attractive? What are you going to do to

Why is this their job to do that? They, like N% of Fedora packagers, are volunteers who just have @redhat.com addresses. They have limited time, resources and ability to keep the packages in Fedora. They, like many other volunteers, are finding that 'free' time is getting smaller, and are trying to come up with ways to keep it in. 

If other people want it to be promoted and attractive, they need to do the marketing work to do so. The alternatives I am seeing here are:

1. This is done this way (if the build system will even allow that without more horrible hacks).
2. OpenJDK is taken out and a different external repo is given a nod like the ones we do for flatpak and such.
3. OpenJDK is taken out, and the various new people step up and put in a IcedTea replacement that 'mostly' works and deals with the trademark issues, and the marketing to get it seen and used.

Staying the same is not an option and is off the table.

--
Stephen Smoogen, Red Hat Automotive
Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle. -- Ian MacClaren