[arch-general] How to have multiple JDKs parallel?

[Eli Schwartz]

On 9/19/18 11:50 AM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
> In the specific case of Java 8 (LTS by AdoptOpenJDK) -> Java 11 (LTS by
> AdoptOpenJDK), I suspect that there will be a hard requirement for most
> Java developers to have support for both simultaneously on their
> development machines because of the whole "module" thing; see below.
> 
> Of course that support would ideally come via the distribution and
> there's a similar precedent for e.g. the node.js LTS releases, I imagine
> for similar reasons to do with large incompatible changes. Anyway, if
> such support is not offered, I'm pretty I certainly will be forced off
> Arch Linux for practical reasons.

We provide nodejs lts releases, because a different Trusted User (not
the packager for nodejs itself) was interested in packaging it.

> Btw, even though the Java language and the byte code are very stable
> "formats", there Java 8 -> Java 9 module transition has been everything
> but trivial and has required a lot of tooling/build changes which would
> be really hard to do across all of the ecosystem at once and any similar
> change in the future could hold up a a Java N -> Java N+1 migration for
> a pretty long time since everybody moves at their own pace.
> 
> (One *hopes* that the trend will become that only the LTS-labeled
> versions will be used for actually releasing stuff to the world, but
> that the intermediate versions will be more seen as experimental. That
> would mean that Arch would only have to care about LTS releases.)

Gosh, I'd hope the trend was instead to have modern, up-to-date releases
that actually work properly.

But I'm sure the habits of the people developing java runtimes, will
force us to package LTS releases.

(Anyway I'm delighted to see the number of java versions decrease by at
least one.)

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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