Hi, I’ve been away from Archiva, and the Maven community at large for little more than a decade, as my career has taken me in other directions. Now I’ve encountered a renewed need for these, and have just attempted installing Archiva 2.2.7 on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine. On my first attempt, I installed using the modern version of Java (17 or 18) already installed on the machine, and that did not go well. The service started, but not the WebApp, as there were fatal errors logged during initialization of the Spring Beans. The logged Exceptions ended in root causes of ClassNotFoundExceptions, which is diagnoseable, and lead me to the conclusion, that it couldn’t find the JAXB classes, as these were moved around Java 8. I then double-checked the system requirements, that list JDK 1.8 as a requirement and tried installing JDK 8, and trying to run Archiva on that. That didn’t change anything, so I manually tried adding a number of JAXB-related jars as suggested in some stackexchange answer, related to similar JAXB problems. This solved the immediate ClassNotFoundExceptions, but actually made the situation worse, as I now get mile long stacktraces, ending with a root cause of a NullPointerException, which is notoriously hard to troubleshoot without detailed insight into the code.
I’m not entirely sure, but my diagnostics so far has lead me to the following observations: * The documented JDK version supported by Archiva is no longer fully supported by Oracle, as it is simply too old * It seems,that Archiva 2.2.7 has never even been tested on the documented Java 8, but only on even older versions even further out of support. * This leads me to the following big question: Is Apache Archiva still being actively supported and maintained, or have the developers behind it moved on to bigger and better things? * If Apache Archiva is dead or dying, what is the recommended Maven repository manager today? Best regards, Simon Kepp.
