On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 8:33 AM Stephen Smoogen <ssmoogen(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, 16 May 2022 at 23:18, Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 9:54 PM Andrew Hughes <gnu.andrew(a)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.
My expectation is based on how both Python and .NET have done this:
The Python team made "Fedora Loves Python":
https://fedoralovespython.org/
The .NET team maintains the Developer page for .NET and has a domain
redirect to it:
https://fedoraloves.net/
These groups also do advocacy for Fedora in their upstreams and the
broader communities. I don't know why you or anyone else wouldn't
expect the packagers of OpenJDK to do advocacy for Fedora to the
OpenJDK project and the broader Java community? Maybe they wouldn't be
alone, but if they're not part of it, then the efforts fail.
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.
It is technically possible for OpenJDK to be built the way this Change
proposes. It would require two extra packaging changes:
1. A "noautobuild" file needs to be added to opt out of mass builds and such
2. The DistTag would need to be dropped (no "%{?dist}" in Release)
After that, OpenJDK would follow the same mechanism the EFI stuff
does, where we go to "single build, multiple tags". Koji by default
automatically inherits builds from the previous tag, so when new tags
are made, the latest build in the previous tag is picked up
automatically. As long as updates for OpenJDK are built against a
particular tag, then the only thing left to do would be to tag in
manually to newer Fedora release candidate tags so Bodhi can pick it
up. Most of the workflow kinks should have been worked out with shim
years ago.
However, doing this has some terrible consequences: You cannot
participate in mass builds. You cannot benefit from newer libraries.
You will not benefit from system improvements. Finally, you are
effectively isolated from the distribution.
But what this Change discussion tells me is that there's something
seriously wrong with the Java TCK. I want to know if any discussion
upstream has been had about streamlining the TCK to make it easier in
the first place.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!