[jdk17u-dev] RFR: 8284772: GHA: Use GCC Major Version Dependencies Only

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:16:29 GMT, Andrew John Hughes <andrew at openjdk.org> wrote:

> GHA regularly breaks because we specify a very explicit GCC version, even down to the release versioning of the Ubuntu package.
> 
> Rather than bumping this yet again like https://github.com/openjdk/jdk17u/commit/260f28761a87553fd634615df5ba3db5b76ae692, this PR suggests dropping the specific version as we did some time ago in 8u and I've also proposed to fix the same breakage in 11u (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk11u-dev/pull/2087). The requirement still specifies a specific major version of GCC. It just means the dependency isn't broken every time Ubuntu bumps to a new minor release or even just makes a minor change to the package alone.
> 
> Note that the current setup does not guarantee sticking with an exact version of GCC anyway, because - as seen by recent GHA breakage - older versions get removed from the package repository. All we get from this exact version requirement is sporadic breakage. If we truly want a static version of GCC, we need to provide our own as we do with the JDK.
> 
> This is based on https://github.com/openjdk/jdk17u-dev/pull/1595 to allow https://github.com/openjdk/jdk17u-dev/pull/1672 to proceed.

Nope, not for 17u.

While the actual removal of minor GCC version tracking might be okay, it is wrong to keep effectively _forward-porting_ the GHA change from 8u -> 11u -> 17u. You need to do this in mainline, argue the point on minor GCC version removals (in other words, the reversal of [JDK-8256393](https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8256393)), and then argue for backports. Otherwise, you will keep doing this for every subsequent XXu.

-------------

Changes requested by shade (Reviewer).

PR Review: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk17u-dev/pull/1673#pullrequestreview-1586671811