Make javafx.controls open and community-driven

[Ty Young]

On 2/2/21 8:16 PM, Nir Lisker wrote:

> Hi Mike,
>
> First of all, I would have you consider revisiting your medical observation
> on the state of JavaFX. If you've read the almost-weekly recurrent threads
> of "should I use Swing or JavaFX" in r/Java, you'd realize that reports of
> JavaFX's death are greatly exaggerated. But yes, it is very understaffed.
> Other than that, there is a discussion list,
> openjfx-discuss at openjdk.java.net, where you can bring up general community
> and social media related topics and continue that branch of the discussion
> there.
>
> 1. I also advocated for having JBS more open in the past. I was told that
> Oracle tried opening JBS for everyone, but it was a big mess. I
> remember Alan Bateman saying a few years ago in an Ask The Architect
> session, when he was asked about this, that more than half of the bugs
> submitted are about OpenGL in Minecraft. These are the things you don't see
> from the outside.


I'm guessing some of those are the OpenGL segfault crash on exit that 
affects (nearly?) *every* OpenGL based Java application for the last few 
years, including JavaFX and Minecraft, on Nvidia hardware. I have to 
clear out my build directory often because of it.


> As for the OCA, it is a license requirement for all of OpenJDK. The
> developers here have nothing to do with it. I suspect you will have to take
> it up with the legal department of Oracle. Good luck :)
>

OCA is more of a symptom of a larger problem IMO: gate keeping.


A long time ago I suggested a 1-liner change to JavaFX's build script 
that would simply place the source zip generated with the JavaFX source 
build *outside* the lib folder. Generating this zip inside the lib 
folder caused runtime problems with Ant and Netbeans whenever you 
designated the entire folder as a lib directory in a project and it 
didn't make sense anyway. It was rejected, IIRC, because of Oracle's or 
Gluon's server configuration issues with the change. There were no 
issues doing a local build that I'm aware of when I tested the change 
locally.


More recently,  Oracle decided to break Swing applications that use the 
GTK L&F on Arch Linux based distros in JDK 16, was notified of the issue 
multiple times by multiple people, and AFAIK refused to revert the 
changes simply because Arch Linux isn't a "supported" distro. AFAIK, 
it's still not possible to even launch Netbeans on Arch Linux without 
overriding the L&F.


Even more recently, I suggested (and was willing to actually do) what I 
thought to be reasonable API changes to Project Panama, which I use in 
my JavaFX application,  were rejected because it was decided a year ago 
behind closed doors discussions that the direction of that API part was 
already decided. Not only that, but the ability to even have a public 
discussion was basically shut down.


Someone has to be that person to make the decisions in the end, but 
often times it feels like free outsourcing rather than contributing. One 
moment it's "You should contribute!" and the next it's "No, I didn't 
mean contribute *that* way!".


Anyway, this is a much larger issue that goes beyond JavaFX and I don't 
want to derail, I'm just pointing out that not only when someone 
suggests reasonable changes and fixes or, better yet(by far!), is 
willing to make those changes, they are denied the ability to do so 
because of reasons that person could not possibly be aware of.