Hi everybody, So, after some recent FESCo decisions (no default module streams in fedora, new Module Policy for fedora and ELN modules), it's time to ask this question again:
What's the future of the Java Stack in fedora, and by extension, in ELN (and possibly RHEL)? For the past ~18 months, the Stewardship SIG has picked up the pieces that were left after the failed attempt of "modularizing" the Java stack, and now the "re-founded" Java SIG has taken over this effort. We've been maintaining the core part of the Java stack (about 200 packages) - first trying to keep it from imploding, and lately, trying to keep it working and up-to-date (also, Java 11 by default, yay). However! This has mostly been a one-man-show, with regular contributions by Mat Booth (whos thankless task is maintaining the Eclipse stack) and the Dogtag PKI team (thanks guys!), who have lately been busy doing other things (fixing blocker bugs for F33 and RHEL 8.3). Looking at the Java packages I own, most of them also wind up in ELN, so I assume that they're going to end up in RHEL at some point. And here I'm asking myself the question: Who's going to maintain those 200 Java packages? Because I have seen *zero* people from Red Hat interacting with the Java stack in fedora in any substantial way in the past year - and by that I mean more than one commit to a package they didn't own or sending one PR on src.fp.org. While working through the *massive* backlog of issues and neglected package updates in the Java stack, I also went through with multiple non-responsive maintainer processes, and almost nobody from the original people who maintained Java packages in fedora are left. Some of those were Red Hat employees, but are apparently no longer, or have moved on to work on different things. Not even the Java modules (javapackages-tools, maven, ant, ...) seem to be in better shape - none of them have been touched in the last 10 months, except for automated mass rebuild commits. They are now pretty out of sync with mainstream fedora, and they still only target the "oldstable" fedora 31 platform. Since javapackages-tools:20190x and maven:3.5 are also no longer default streams, they are unused (?), and seem to have been abandoned. So. Who is actually maintaining the Java stack in RHEL? I can't tell. Who is maintaining the core build tools (xmvn, maven, ant, etc.)? Why are they not - or no longer - contributing to fedora packages or interacting with fedora maintainers? Does Red Hat no longer care about all their Java products [1]? Can we please increase the bus / lottery factor (= 1) for Java package maintenance in fedora? Fabio / decathorpe PS: I'm not talking about the JDK packages here. They're in good hands, as far as I can tell. [1]: JBoss / WildFly were among the first things to be retired during the modularity calamity, because nobody cared. But what about the shiny new thing, Quarkus? Will it ever be packaged for fedora? _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
