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

[Thomas Stuefe]

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.

I'm very much in favor of dropping the GCC minor version dependency since it has been a huge pain. I don't care for patch direction, as long as we can convince mainline to do the same.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk17u-dev/pull/1673#issuecomment-1686232781