About Jenkins in Debian

[Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>]

Hi all,

I'm pondering what we should do about Jenkins in Debian. For the
reminder Jenkins development moves too fast and LTS releases are not
supported long enough to make it suitable for Debian stable. Security
fixes end up being almost impossible to backport properly. Moreover
upstream already provides .deb packages so there is little incentive to
duplicate this effort in Debian. We are also short on manpower to
maintain the whole Jenkins ecosystem.

At this point here are the options I think we could consider:

1. Provide updates for Debian stable through the backport repository.
   Unfortunately James Page the original maintainer gave up, I'd
   prefer focusing my energy on other applications not as well
   integrated with Debian yet, and nobody showed its interest in
   the Jenkins packaging lately.

2. Package a subset of Jenkins.
   We could keep only the jenkins-cli and jenkins-slave package as they
   provide a real added value over the upstream .deb package. This
   subset should be easier to maintain.

3. Remove Jenkins completely.

What do you think?

Emmanuel Bourg