Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: James Le Cuirot <chewi@g.o>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-08-09
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:28:24
Message-Id: 20150805222756.5b95b9ec@symphony.aura-online.co.uk
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for Agenda Items -- Council Meeting 2015-08-09 by Rich Freeman
1 On Wed, 5 Aug 2015 06:52:23 -0400
2 Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
3
4 > On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 5:07 PM, James Le Cuirot <chewi@g.o>
5 > wrote:
6 > >
7 > > Sorry for the lateness of this but monsieurp and I would like to
8 > > have a discussion on the state of Java. This is perhaps less
9 > > technical than the average council meeting discussion but we feel
10 > > that this precarious situation threatens Gentoo as a whole and
11 > > needs to at least be acknowledged, if not addressed.
12 >
13 > What else do you need to see acknowledged? What proposal do you have
14 > for addressing these problems that requires council approval?
15
16 I don't have any obvious answer besides the suggestion of one infamous
17 former developer that the recruiters should be more proactive in their
18 approach instead of just waiting for people to show up at the door.
19 That worked in the past but Gentoo isn't so popular now.
20
21 My main intention though, was merely to warn the council that if
22 monsieurp and I were to throw in the towel, the Java packages would
23 stagnate very quickly, and users would soon notice, especially now that
24 Java vulnerabilities are publicised rather widely. When we arrived,
25 Oracle was about to EOL Java 7. Gentoo hadn't even marked that stable
26 yet and Java 8 was still masked. Java 9 is on the horizon too and the
27 VM packages are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if we hadn't shown
28 up at all!
29
30 It isn't inconceivable that we would walk out as it has been heavy
31 going and we are both getting rather tired. Neither of us even has a
32 vested interest in Java and we primarily do this work because we simply
33 don't want to see this fail. We are ever conscious that there would be
34 no one else to pick up the baton and all the effort we have put in, and
35 the efforts of those before us, would go to waste. What keeps me going
36 right now is knowing that we have made the most significant dent in the
37 bug count by far since Bugzilla records began.
38
39 http://www.aura-online.co.uk/~chewi/java-bugs.png
40
41 This may not last though and note that this is only about half of the
42 bugs assigned to us.
43
44 Would the users really care? I believe they would. I know some users
45 and even some developers can be quite dismissive of Java but we still
46 see a lot of bugs filed from people who want to see this stuff working
47 and I was quite surprised by the amount of noise that was made when we
48 fumbled the stabilisation of the Java 7 virtuals and the unmasking of
49 the Java 8 virtuals. We've even had one user asking us to fix Tomcat
50 because he's using it on real planes flying real people.
51
52 If we can't satisfy these users then this will reflect badly on Gentoo
53 as a whole at a time when we really can't take our user base for
54 granted. I honestly fear for the future.
55
56 Perhaps I've said most of what I need to say already in this mail and
57 I'd gladly welcome responses here but I felt that it was important to
58 put this in front of the people in charge.
59
60 --
61 James Le Cuirot (chewi)
62 Gentoo Linux Developer

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