Le 2019-03-26 16:51, Japheth Cleaver a écrit :
The tooling around the original ecosystem seemed to have no rhyme or
reason with it, JPackage efforts never *fully* went anywhere,
JPackage certainly went somewhere, and this somewhere is Fedora/Red Hat.
To recap, JPackage existed because the JDK was not open source,
preventing the packaging of Java software in Linux definitions. JPackage
was successful first in making some of the key Java software of the time
available on Linux systems on a controlled QAed way, and second in
helping to convince SUN it needed to open the JDK code or it would lose
control of the Java ecosystem (I can tell you that SUN and other big
Java companies were definitely aware and looking at JPackage at the time
SUN made its openjdk decision).
With the opening of the JDK the core reason for JPackage to exist
outside distributions vanished and Red Hat promptly hired most of the
core JPackage team and told it to work for RHEL/Fedora.
Therefore, since a decade at least the stewardship of defining of how to
integrate Java software in Linux packages, and convincing upstream Java
projects to do package-friendly things, has rested on Fedora and Red
Hat. That is a much heavier burden than working with language
communities that already agreed to be Linux distribution friendly.
We see now it has not turned out well. I wasn't involved in this phase,
so I have no idea why. Certainly, Red Hat, which is now the official
maintainer of several OpenJDK versions upstream, which bought JBoss,
which had several initiatives (like 389 server) that relied on Java
parts, which is now part of IBM (another huge Java stakeholder), had all
the required weight to make things happen. Certainly more than the small
JPackage team (which managed a definite impact at the time).
I can only explain it with lots of complacency Red Hat and Fedora side,
Java was not going anywhere, no one was ever going to write Enterprisey
free software in another language, no need to expend a lot of effort to
get past what JPackage had already achieved, the Java & JPackage
investment was safe. Well Kubernetes was rewritten from Java to Go and
is massively used in Enterprises today, and the whole generation of
cloud-oriented enterprise software is looking like it will abandon Java
altogether. You rip what you sow.
If it was just me I'd tell all the various free software Java teams
within Red Hat/Fedora to agree on a single Java component tech (probably
Java modules), define a standard FHS-compatible materialization of those
components, define basic sanity versioning rules ("if component N
version X needs itself to build, it MUST work with version X-1") and
then set a deadline, after which Red Hat/Fedora releases that do not
conform to this model are not accepted anymore. That would get the ball
rolling Java dev side.
But it's not me and I have decided quite a long time ago to work on
other things than Java software, so whatever actually happens is up to
Fedora and Red Hat/IBM leadership. I certainly hope that someone within
Fedora instances alerted the main sponsor that things were starting to
burn.
--
Nicolas Mailhot
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