Re: The (uncalled for) toolchain maintainers roll call for stretch

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 15.09.2016 22:43, Helge Deller wrote:
> Hi Matthias,
> 
> On 10.09.2016 00:48, Matthias Klose wrote:
>> While the Debian Release team has some citation about the quality of the
>> toolchain on their status page, it is not one of the release criteria documented
>> by the release team.  I'd like to document the status how I do understand it for
>> some of the toolchains available in Debian.
> ....
>> Java/OpenJDK
>> ------------
>>
>> For the stretch release openjdk-8 will be fine as the default java
>> implementation.  For buster, gcj (to be removed in GCC 7) won't be available
>> anymore, and we'll end up with architectures without a java implementation.  At
>> the same time I'd like to consider to stop providing OpenJDK zero builds,
>> leaving powerpc and mips* without a java implementation as well (currently not
>> building for openjdk-9).  armhf (not armel) and s390x have Hotspot ports underway.
> 
> Can you explain the reason why you consider stopping OpenJDK zero builds?

the zero builds usually break on various architectures when the hotspot version
is updated.  So the zero ports require extra work and hinder migration of the
packages to testing when they ftbfs.  Afaiu the security team also doesn't care
about these ports when they fail to build for security updates.

> I'm asking, because on hppa we currently use gcj and we don't have any OpenJDK port yet.
> My hope was to fix at some point in future the old existing OpenJDK zero port patches to get some newer
> JDK even if it's slower. With your intention to stop zero builds, we probably won't have any
> JDK at all...

I can't care for all ports which are not release architectures. Feel free to

 - send patches for the openjdk-8 package
 - look at the openjdk-9 build failures and send patches for
   the openjdk-9 package
 - Prepare to get these patches into openjdk-10, do regular builds
   of openjdk-10 when it becomes open for development, and continue
   to do so as long as you want to have it building.

Matthias