Re: Impact of the new Java release policy on Debian
On 24.11.2017 11:05, Emmanuel Bourg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Oracle has recently announced a new release policy for Java [1][2], to
> sum it up:
> - new major Java revisions will now be released every 6 months
> - there will be non-LTS releases supported for 6 months, and LTS
> releases supported 5+ years
> - LTS releases will be cut every 3 years
> - Java 9 is *not* a LTS release, the next one will be Java 11
> (previously named Java 18.9), to be released in September 2018
>
> This is of course the policy for Oracle Java, not OpenJDK. It's not
> clear at this point if other players like Red Hat intend to support
> non-LTS OpenJDK releases longer than 6 months.
yes, and I think there is the wrong conclusion that *OpenJDK* LTS releases will
get five years of support. What I am reading is that OpenJDK source releases
will be made for 18 months (three updates), not more, and that the sources for
those Oracle releases are not made public.
> Assuming that Debian will stick to the LTS releases as defined by Oracle
> I can see the following consequences:
> - openjdk-9 will not be part of Buster, and we should aim for openjdk-11
> instead.
> - If the freeze for buster starts in December 2018, we'll barely have 2
> months to complete the transition. Ideally we should start testing
> sooner with pre-release builds.
> - If we keep openjdk-8 as the default JRE until openjdk-11 is ready we
> may not catch runtime issues with the latest JREs and fix them in time
> for the freeze. This means we should probably change the default JRE as
> soon as possible to openjdk-9/10 but keep openjdk-8 in the archive as a
> possible fallback if we can't complete the transition to openjdk-11
> before the freeze.
> - After Java 11 the next LTS would be Java 17 to be released in
> September 2021, probably after the Debian 11 release which would thus
> ship the same JRE than Debian 10.
having an unsupported OpenJDK version in a release which is only used for
building packages could be an option, yes.
Matthias
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