Hi !
This mail from the builds team will hit us deeply. We need to evaluate
the possible impact on our projects, and act accordingly.
Sadly, this is quite short notice, because it's before the end of october.
We have to check what is going to be the impact in teh coming days.
Thanks!
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Removal of some older JDKS - Jenkins and Buildbot CI agents
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2025 15:41:52 +0200
From: Gavin McDonald <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: builds <[email protected]>
Hi All.
As the years go by, we continue to add new JDKs as they are being asked for
by projects, or proactively in some cases (!).
What we tend to do less of, and do it quietly, is the 'removal' of older
JDKs, usually
when newer versions of the major/minor release line come out.
We have traditionally kept the 'last' release of a Major JDK and had it
symlinked
as latest.
Some of these are quite old now, and projects should not be using them. It
also
makes it harder for Infra as a whole to maintain older versions onto new OS
VMs
as they come out.
We have in the past obtained and rebuilt JDKs as far back as JDK 1.4 - this
is no longer
viable or advisable, Infra is in fact doing a disservice by keeping these
available.
If a project needs to built on an ancient JDK, then it should obtain and
include this in
their own builds themselves. I seriously hope though that projects are no
longer using most of
these mentioned below. (The versions include any vendor, OpenJDK, Adoptium,
Oracle, IBM etc)
None of the JDKs below will be made available for any of the 24.04 and
latest agents.
All of the JDKs listed below will be removed from all Jenkins and Buildbot
agents
of 18.04, 20.04 and 22.04 by the end of October. If you happen to be using
any of these
versions then please do alter your builds to not use them.
JDK 1.4+, JDK 1.5+, JDK 1.6+, JDK 1.7+, JDK 1.9+, JDK 10+, JDK 12+, JDK
13+, JDK 14+, JDK 15+, JDK 16+, JDK 18+
To recap, all of the above versions and their 'latest' symlinks will be
removed before the end of this month. Other more recent non-LTS lines such
as JDK 19, JDK 20 etc will be reviewed in 6 months time.
See also :
Jenkins -
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/JDK+Installation+Matrix
Buildbot -
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/JDK+Installation+Matrix+-+Buildbot
You can also find Infra on the publically available #builds Slack channel
on 'the-asf' Slack instance where you can discuss this and any other CI
related topic.
This email is also being sent to users@infra 'as a separate email' for more
visibility.
If you have to reply by email, please do not cross post.
I encourage comments to the related INFRA ticket [1] or queries to the
#builds Slack channel.
[1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-27315
Kind Regards.
--
*Gavin McDonald - *
Systems Administrator, ASF Infrastructure Team
V.P Travel Assistance Committee
