What does LTS mean for OpenJDK?

Ed Munoz Ed.Munoz at microfocus.com
Thu Sep 6 22:54:05 UTC 2018


The responses on this thread have helped to clarify the situation regarding OpenJDK 11 and later. (Thank you!)



I have similar questions regarding OpenJDK 8.



Dalibor Topic's post below says:

> A similar transition [of maintainers] would also happen for OpenJDK 8 Updates after January 2019, assuming that a suitable Project Lead steps forward to carry on the maintenance work led by Oracle developers since 2014.



Questions:



1) Are there one or more parties willing to step forward to assume the role of maintainer for JDK 8 after Oracle steps down as maintainer? For example, Red Hat has said it may step forward to be the maintainer for JDK 11 - might it also step forward to be the maintainer for JDK 8?



2) Will Oracle's expected announcement on "End of maintenance & invitation for new maintainers" for JDK 8 be posted on this (jdk-dev) mailing list? Or on jdk8u-dev? It would be helpful to know where and when to watch for it.



3) What platforms will be maintained for JDK 8 after the new maintainer steps in? If this is not yet known, when can we expect to get clarification on this? Will it be the same platforms as are currently supported? Or are some platform changes expected? Will Win32 still be supported?



4) How long will JDK 8 be maintained? A Red Hat site lists June 2023, referring to JDK support in RHEL. https://access.redhat.com/articles/1299013 The AdoptOpenJDK site lists September 2022. https://adoptopenjdk.net/support.html  When do we expect to have a more definite sense of how long OpenJDK 8 security updates will be available for the various platforms that OpenJDK supports?



5) Let's expand Jack Shirazi's post about JDK 11 support to include JDK 8. Is this a reasonable statement of what is expected to happen with security updates?



Assume it is less than 6 months since the release of JDK 12 (say, July 2019), and Oracle announces a security update to Java.

- Oracle would apply that to their paid-for Oracle Java 12 build (and possibly to some paid-for Oracle Java back versions).

- Oracle would also apply it to the OpenJDK Java 12 build.

- Oracle would NOT apply it the latest OpenJDK Java 11 build.

- The jdk11u project WILL backport that to the OpenJDK Java 11 build.

- AdoptOpenJDK will provide builds of that Java 11 upgraded version, so that upgraded OpenJDK Java 11 build will be available for public consumption.

- The jdk8u project WILL backport that to the OpenJDK Java 8 build.

- AdoptOpenJDK will provide builds of that Java 8 upgraded version, so that upgraded OpenJDK Java 8 build will be available for public consumption.


Thanks,

-Ed Munoz
ed.munoz at microfocus.com<mailto:ed.munoz at microfocus.com>

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

Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2018 15:23:42 +0200

From: dalibor topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com<mailto:dalibor.topic at oracle.com>>

To: jdk-dev at openjdk.java.net<mailto:jdk-dev at openjdk.java.net>

Subject: Re: What does LTS mean for OpenJDK?

Message-ID: <4350b6f9-d169-359e-d278-b31220a3d03b at oracle.com<mailto:4350b6f9-d169-359e-d278-b31220a3d03b at oracle.com>>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed



On 17.08.2018 18:36, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

> The LTS (long term support) release Java 11 is nearly upon us. But

> what does LTS mean in the context of OpenJDK?



Please see http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/322



"If a release is part of a series of releases for which an implementor offers long-term support then the value of $OPT should start with "LTS", e.g., 11.0.2+13-LTS. This will cause "LTS" to be displayed prominently in the output of java --version, etc."



Whether an implementor decides to offer long term support for a given OpenJDK release, for how long they do it, which platforms they chose to support in this way, is ultimately up to them.



So far Oracle, for example, has cumulatively contributed almost 15 years of maintenance to OpenJDK between OpenJDK 6, JDK 7 Updates, JDK 8 Updates, JDK 9 updates and JDK 10 updates across a lot of different OS/CPU platforms.



Over the last couple of years, we have developed a model to transition between different teams of maintainers across OpenJDK update releases.



For example, Oracle developers maintained OpenJDK 6 for 5 years. After they stepped down, they enabled other developers to take over OpenJDK 6 maintenance. Those developers, focusing on a different set of operating systems from Oracle developers, continued to work on the OpenJDK 6 source code until, eventually, they stopped. Then another set of developers continued where they left, with yet again a different set of operating systems that they cared about.



A similar transition has happened with OpenJDK 7 Updates, after almost 4 years of maintenance by Oracle developers.



A similar transition would also happen for OpenJDK 8 Updates after January 2019, assuming that a suitable Project Lead steps forward to carry on the maintenance work led by Oracle developers since 2014.



Since such transitions are bound to happen more often under the new release cycle, there is a process for them in the JDK Updates Project as described in http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-February/000064.html

.



You can observe that process in the works via the jdk-updates-dev mailing list, specifically with respect to JDK 10 maintenance via http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-July/000143.html

.



> What will Java 11 get from Oracle?

Well, long term support, for one, as discussed on http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/eol-135779.html .



But beside that, it will get a reference implementation in OpenJDK.

Followed by, assuming that the transition from JDK 10 to JDK 11 proves to be as smooth as the transition from JDK 9 to JDK 10 was, at least six months of JDK 11 updates maintained by Oracle developers and contributed to the corresponding OpenJDK JDK Updates Project jdk11u repository along with binaries being published at http://jdk.java.net.



Finally, JDK 11 would get an orderly maintainer transition process.



Specifically, at some point after a jdk11u repo is established in the JDK Updates Project, an e-mail to jdk-updates-dev would announce when Oracle would stop contributing to that particular repository. For JDK 10, it looked like this:

http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-May/000128.html

.



After the last OpenJDK JDK 11u release led by Oracle, a call for future 11u maintainers such as http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2018-July/000143.html

would go out on the jdk-updates-dev list, and, if someone qualified stepped up on the list, there would be some work to do on an orderly transition of maintainer duties for that repo within the JDK Update Project - rather unexciting things like dealing with updates to hgcheck and jcheck configurations for the repo, for example.



You can read the jdk7u-dev mailing list archives from the time of transition, if you want to know the details. Some details will of course end up being slightly different for JDK 11 Updates, since we will use the existing JDK Updates Project for jdk11u, we'll have a single repo instead of a forest, and so on.



cheers,

dalibor topic

--

<http://www.oracle.com> Dalibor Topic | Principal Product Manager

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