Re: openjdk maintenance for wheezy and squeeze

[Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com>]

Am 01.03.2013 04:35, schrieb Moritz Mühlenhoff:
> Backporting security fixes with Java has turned out to be more of less 
> unfeasible. I tried this once with DSA 2507 and I think that amounted to at least
> two man days of work for that update alone. Also, Ubuntu has shipped 
> backports to all suites in USN-1724 and AFAICS the world hasn't stopped. 
> After all, everyone using Oracle Java will be exposed to the same 
> behaviourial changes.
> 
> So we should proceed with providing backports for openjdk in the future.

will that be in backports, stable updates, or security?

> If Matthias keeps the Debian/Ubuntu packaging in a state that it's easily
> buildable on squeeze/wheezy for ojdk6 and for wheezy on ojdk7 I think
> we should be able to handle Java updates resource-wise.

I do not intend to break that intentionally. Some back-porting may show some
issues, like patches not updated for older releases.  There is a chance to break
zero on some architectures, however if you feel that might become an issue, just
disable zero for powerpc, ppc64, s390, s390x, as done for mips/mipsel. The
hotspot port for sparc/sparc64 seems to work currently, so your call how to
maintain it for wheezy.

> I'm not familiar with the Java internals, but if we're following that approach
> it would make sense to upgrade Wheezy to the version in experimental
> (i.e. 7u15 instead of 7u3).

I won't upload this myself. IcedTea 7-2.3 uses two hotspot versions, one for the
zero ports, one for the hotspot runtimes. From my point of view it would be good
to update to a 7-2.[45] with a unified hotspot version capable to build both
zero and hotspot, and keep the current 7-2.1.x for now.

  Matthias