kotlin2 in Debian -- 2025W21 update

[Julien Plissonneau Duquène <sre4ever@free.fr>]

Good evening,

Thirty years ago to this day Java made its first public appearance at 
the Sun World Conference in San Francisco. This was right at the peak of 
"the network is the computer" era [1], before the Cloud became a thing. 
Today Java remains a fairly popular platform, still integrating 
innovations, evolving to address new challenges [2], and being trusted 
to reliably run mission-critical applications.

Though there is no definitive timeline of when the project that would 
become Java was initiated by Sun, it's likely to be a bit before the 
Debian Project was announced (1993) and could be as early as 1991, the 
year Linus Torvalds started to work on his kernel "hobby" project.

But let's get back to things that I know are expected to build some more 
games ;)

Le 2025-05-18 13:41, Julien Plissonneau Duquène a écrit :
> getting the "zipCompiler" task to actually start building things

I'm not there yet: I've started to de-vendor some of the dependencies 
that would be embedded in an upstream binary release (among them asm, 
log4j, fastutil) and then hit a snag as for some subprojects Gradle now 
tries to pull in as a transitive dependency a version of kotlin-stdlib 
that is not allowed by Kotlin's build script, despite my custom 
dependency rewriting logic (that is not even executed in this case) and 
the proper presence of `isTransitive = false` in the buildscript; I even 
added an `exclude(...)` that was ignored as well. So I'm now 
investigating this with a debugger.

Some non-trivial (but not too complicated either) additional patching of 
the asm package will be necessary for the compiler to work correctly.

I now have a Mastodon account [3] that you can use to follow me. I'm 
probably going to toot there the progress on kotlin and gradle as 
milestones are reached. The next one is still the same as last week.

And finally I will submit a Java/JVM BoF proposal to the DebConf25, as I 
think we deserve this as a team.

Cheers,


[1]: https://archive.org/details/Schmidt1995
[2]: https://dev.java/community/java-30-anniversary/
[3]: https://chaos.social/@sre4ever

--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène