Notes from the DebConf 17 Java BOF

[Tom Marble <tmarble@info9.net>]

All:

Here are my rough notes from today's BOF.. Please followup with
corrections!

Regards,

--Tom

1. Making openjdk-9 the default for buster
   - Yes we should try to do this.
   - We will gain some fixes for reproducible builds
   - Chris West has done some excellent work trying to rebuild the
     archive with openjdk-9
   - FYI: the next Ubuntu LTS in April would like to ship with openjdk-9

2. Targets without HotSpot
   - We could maintain this with gcj (despite gcj being dropped from
     upstream)
   - Maintaining Zero is a headache for security
   - kfreebsd
     + Requires upstreaming patches
     + Conditional compilation is not clean
     + Consider dropping
   - Missing MIPS
   - Missing armel (may be dropped in buster)

3. Scala
   - We discussed the value of packaging sbt
   - Need to fix a reproducible build problem to bring it from
     experimental to stable

4. Clojure
   - Currently does not have JDK 9 support
   - The Clojure Team will look into this with upstream

5. javadoc
   - Our packages that are standards 4.0.1 compliant should support
    "nodoc"
   - Some users appreciate offline access to docs

6. Autopkgtest
   - We should use this more
   - Can include built-in tests
   - We can (or autopkgtest already does) use 'ratt' to test reverse deps

7. We discussed keithp's uberjar idea
   - We *could* work like the rest of the world and ship uberjars (and
     make source packages that include all source for transitive deps)
   - We suspect ftp-masters may not be happy about this
   - Go ahead plan is to think of even more automation to do what
     we already do now.

8. Misc
   - Tony mentioned japi-compliance-check verify the API of jars
   - Tom mentioned the utility (need) for us to search for pkg/classes
     in the archive (as we used to do with twerner's tool). Ideally
     this would include some machine readable format (e.g. JSON) that
     would avoid typical 'grep' search problems.
   - Elana discussed the idea of possibly pruning libs in the archive
     for which there are no reverse deps to build tools or applications
     and have not been used (popcon) or maintained (out of date).
   - We discussed that arch all should be multi-arch foreign
   - We wondered which buildd's arch all packages get built on?
   - There was some discussion about JNI moving from /usr/lib/jni to /usr/lib/TRIPLE/jni/