Hi,
Thank you to all those who participated to the Java/JVM BoF two weeks
ago at DebConf25.
As with many things at this DebConf it was a bit chaotic to start but a fallback was quickly worked out and we could proceed with all 10
participants, 8 on site and 2 remote on Jitsi.
After a round of introduction we discussed the following items:
* build tools — I did a quick recap of where we currently were with the upgrades of Gradle and Kotlin, and Vladimir added a few words about his
own contribution to this work. Work on some other popular build tools
such as sbt and Bazel is also on the radar.
* IDEs — Vladimir reported that JetBrains is planning some changes in
the distribution of IDEA [1] that may make it easier to package. As the
same open source base is used for Android Studio and the source package
already exists in Debian, we are certainly going to look at what else
would be needed to build a working IDE at some point in the future.
[1]:
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2025/07/intellij-idea-unified-distribution-plan/
Then we considered the Eclipse IDE, and whether attempting to package it
is a worthy and realistic goal. Emmanuel said that this project is too
large to be properly packaged and maintained with our current resources
and I agree with him: proper integration is complex, and it's
tentacular, so it's likely to amount to a full-time job.
Mechtilde suggested that Debian could provide an installer script in
contrib to help users install Eclipse quickly. Alex proposed that
instead of providing the Eclipse IDE in Debian, detailed wiki pages
could be written to help users to properly install the IDE on a Debian
system. [Note: a page already exists [2] but it's probably incomplete
and outdated.]
[2]:
https://wiki.debian.org/Eclipse
* JDKs — Trixie will ship the JDK 21 (LTS), and unstable already
features an Early Access preview of the next LTS (25) to be released in September. Vladimir performed a mass rebuild of Java packages [3] with
it and ended up with only 39 build failures, much less than in the
previous migration to 21 (146).
[3]:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2025/07/msg00000.html
During DebCamp I was told that some people believe that the JDKs
provided by Debian are not fit for use in production as they are only "reference implementations", and they would like Debian to ship the
Eclipse (previously Adoptium) Temurin builds instead. This would have
some benefits (as Temurin is known and used by popular build tools and
IDEs) but it's probably not possible because the Debian policy is likely
to conflict with the Temurin trademark policy. Instead I suggested that
we study and document the differences between both builds (that are
probably pretty similar) and eventually work on minimizing the
divergences.
I shared again my intention to reintroduce legacy LTS JDKs to the stable distribution for the purpose of building and testing packages, with no
formal security support and appropriate disclaimers. Matthias would be
fine with that. I still have to validate this plan with Moritz.
* transitions — from a trusted source (online references missing) I
learned that it will soon be possible to do proper transitions [4] with Architecture: all packages (such as Java libraries). An update to the transition tracker is on the way, and scheduling binNMUs will be
possible.
As a reminder:
The Release Team considers everything a transition where the upload of
a package requires changes (rebuilds or actual patches) to reverse dependencies.
[4]:
https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/Transitions
* autopkgtests — they are on the radar too. Currently too much breakage caused by updates is detected (too) late; autopkgtests would help to
detect issues sooner and take appropriate decisions. In some cases there
are only a few dependencies that are missing to be able to run the
upstream test suites.
* reproducible builds — the current trend is to have build tools (such
as Gradle, but also Maven) validate cryptographic signatures of
dependencies at build time. A way to build signed artifacts would be to
have them signed by the maintainer and the signature(s) committed to the package source before upload: this would in practice enforce a strictly reproducible build between the developer system and the CI (though a way
to fail the package build if the signature doesn't match has yet to be implemented).
Does Gradle fulfill the requirements for reproducible builds? Yes:
features were included into this build tool to make it possible to build reproducibly with it.
* helping and Debian Java Documentation — documentation is outdated and users/developers/maintainers don't know where to look for. The Java
Policy is due for some updates as well.
The Debian Go Packaging Team pages [5] are IMO an interesting example of
how a "team portal" could be structured.
[5]:
https://go-team.pages.debian.net/
To make the #debian-java IRC channel more welcoming for newcomers and discussions, it was proposed to move the gitlab notifications out of it
to a separate channel and reduce their verbosity [and this was since
done by lavamind — thank you!].
There is also the team blog [6] that hasn't been updated since 2019. I'm planning to post updates on major milestones of build tool upgrades, and
it would be nice if someone else could prepare a post about "what's new
in Trixie" summarizing the changes in and around Java packages that are
about to be released.
[6]:
https://java.debian.net/blog/
* next meeting — a quarterly video call on Jitsi? This was suggested and
most participants seemed interested. For the first meeting I've started
a poll [7] to figure out which days would be preferred in the range
September 10 to 23, then by late August I will run another poll to
choose a day and time within the most popular days.
[7]:
https://beta.framadate.org/polls/92ae6badb5f59bf80f21
* group picture — unfortunately I wasn't able to convince my phone front camera to focus on the group behind me so we get ... an unvoluntarily privacy-preserving picture? [8] (I really should have taken more
pictures with me completely out of the field then stitch them, but I
didn't think about that at the time.) Sorry about that, but anyway here
it is.
[8]:
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/114/955/272/469/556/489/original/f8248965003bb8e4.jpg
Cheers,
--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
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