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On Wed, 5 Aug 2015 06:52:23 -0400 |
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Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote: |
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> On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 5:07 PM, James Le Cuirot <chewi@g.o> |
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> wrote: |
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> > |
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> > Sorry for the lateness of this but monsieurp and I would like to |
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> > have a discussion on the state of Java. This is perhaps less |
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> > technical than the average council meeting discussion but we feel |
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> > that this precarious situation threatens Gentoo as a whole and |
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> > needs to at least be acknowledged, if not addressed. |
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> |
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> What else do you need to see acknowledged? What proposal do you have |
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> for addressing these problems that requires council approval? |
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I don't have any obvious answer besides the suggestion of one infamous |
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former developer that the recruiters should be more proactive in their |
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approach instead of just waiting for people to show up at the door. |
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That worked in the past but Gentoo isn't so popular now. |
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My main intention though, was merely to warn the council that if |
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monsieurp and I were to throw in the towel, the Java packages would |
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stagnate very quickly, and users would soon notice, especially now that |
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Java vulnerabilities are publicised rather widely. When we arrived, |
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Oracle was about to EOL Java 7. Gentoo hadn't even marked that stable |
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yet and Java 8 was still masked. Java 9 is on the horizon too and the |
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VM packages are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if we hadn't shown |
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up at all! |
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It isn't inconceivable that we would walk out as it has been heavy |
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going and we are both getting rather tired. Neither of us even has a |
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vested interest in Java and we primarily do this work because we simply |
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don't want to see this fail. We are ever conscious that there would be |
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no one else to pick up the baton and all the effort we have put in, and |
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the efforts of those before us, would go to waste. What keeps me going |
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right now is knowing that we have made the most significant dent in the |
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bug count by far since Bugzilla records began. |
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|
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http://www.aura-online.co.uk/~chewi/java-bugs.png |
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This may not last though and note that this is only about half of the |
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bugs assigned to us. |
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Would the users really care? I believe they would. I know some users |
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and even some developers can be quite dismissive of Java but we still |
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see a lot of bugs filed from people who want to see this stuff working |
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and I was quite surprised by the amount of noise that was made when we |
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fumbled the stabilisation of the Java 7 virtuals and the unmasking of |
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the Java 8 virtuals. We've even had one user asking us to fix Tomcat |
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because he's using it on real planes flying real people. |
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If we can't satisfy these users then this will reflect badly on Gentoo |
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as a whole at a time when we really can't take our user base for |
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granted. I honestly fear for the future. |
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Perhaps I've said most of what I need to say already in this mail and |
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I'd gladly welcome responses here but I felt that it was important to |
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put this in front of the people in charge. |
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|
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-- |
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James Le Cuirot (chewi) |
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Gentoo Linux Developer |