Workshop topic: Archive of JDK EA tagged binaries

[Chris Hegarty]

Hi,

I would like to propose the following topic for the workshop:

Title: Archive of JDK EA tagged binaries

Abstract: Projects that keep up to date with the latest JDK releases,
e.g. upon release immediately adopt JDK 21, then 21.0.1, then 21.0.2,
then 22, etc, would benefit greatly from archived tagged builds.

For mainline EA releases, these builds are available throughout the
development cycle, but no archive is available. For update releases, the
benefit of EA testing is somewhat less valuable since the CPU fixes are
not available until post GA, but still EA testing can catch non-CPU
related issues.

An archive is beneficial as it significantly improves the ability to
track down development-time bugs (before they are shipped), both in
terms of:

  1. performing a bisect to narrow down when a bug or change in behaviour
     was introduced, and

  2. allowing non-JDK savvy devs to track down a bug or change in
     behaviour

Both the above can be done by doing self-builds, but this takes much
longer and is not something that the average (!) Java dev is comfortable
doing.

Finally, the model of adopting the latest JDK is fantastic for moving
the platform and ecosystem forward, let's support it in whatever way we
can.

Length: short

Biography: Chris Hegarty, OpenJDK and Lucene committer, Software
Engineer at Elastic

Thanks,
Chris.

[*] Adoptium has some limited support for update release nightlies.