On 2/2/21 8:16 PM, Nir Lisker wrote:
Hi Mike,
First of all, I would have you consider revisiting your medical observation
on the state of JavaFX. If you've read the almost-weekly recurrent threads
of "should I use Swing or JavaFX" in r/Java, you'd realize that reports of
JavaFX's death are greatly exaggerated. But yes, it is very understaffed.
Other than that, there is a discussion list,
openjfx-disc...@openjdk.java.net, where you can bring up general community
and social media related topics and continue that branch of the discussion
there.
1. I also advocated for having JBS more open in the past. I was told that
Oracle tried opening JBS for everyone, but it was a big mess. I
remember Alan Bateman saying a few years ago in an Ask The Architect
session, when he was asked about this, that more than half of the bugs
submitted are about OpenGL in Minecraft. These are the things you don't see
from the outside.
I'm guessing some of those are the OpenGL segfault crash on exit that
affects (nearly?) *every* OpenGL based Java application for the last few
years, including JavaFX and Minecraft, on Nvidia hardware. I have to
clear out my build directory often because of it.
As for the OCA, it is a license requirement for all of OpenJDK. The
developers here have nothing to do with it. I suspect you will have to take
it up with the legal department of Oracle. Good luck :)
OCA is more of a symptom of a larger problem IMO: gate keeping.
A long time ago I suggested a 1-liner change to JavaFX's build script
that would simply place the source zip generated with the JavaFX source
build *outside* the lib folder. Generating this zip inside the lib
folder caused runtime problems with Ant and Netbeans whenever you
designated the entire folder as a lib directory in a project and it
didn't make sense anyway. It was rejected, IIRC, because of Oracle's or
Gluon's server configuration issues with the change. There were no
issues doing a local build that I'm aware of when I tested the change
locally.
More recently, Oracle decided to break Swing applications that use the
GTK L&F on Arch Linux based distros in JDK 16, was notified of the issue
multiple times by multiple people, and AFAIK refused to revert the
changes simply because Arch Linux isn't a "supported" distro. AFAIK,
it's still not possible to even launch Netbeans on Arch Linux without
overriding the L&F.
Even more recently, I suggested (and was willing to actually do) what I
thought to be reasonable API changes to Project Panama, which I use in
my JavaFX application, were rejected because it was decided a year ago
behind closed doors discussions that the direction of that API part was
already decided. Not only that, but the ability to even have a public
discussion was basically shut down.
Someone has to be that person to make the decisions in the end, but
often times it feels like free outsourcing rather than contributing. One
moment it's "You should contribute!" and the next it's "No, I didn't
mean contribute *that* way!".
Anyway, this is a much larger issue that goes beyond JavaFX and I don't
want to derail, I'm just pointing out that not only when someone
suggests reasonable changes and fixes or, better yet(by far!), is
willing to make those changes, they are denied the ability to do so
because of reasons that person could not possibly be aware of.
